"Project CARS 3" gave me plenty of time to get behind the wheel of a variety of cars. As we approached the later stages of the campaign and online play, we were able to witness how things heat up with increasingly faster cars, more and more intense competition, and sometimes even full throttle in curious cars.

We ran through everything from road e-races to hypercars, which you can hear about in the campaign's early check-ins.

When we entered our first GT-class race, we knew we couldn't leave our Mitsubishi Lancer, which we had already driven from Class E to Hypercar, alone, so we modified it to racing specs using the in-game upgrade system, and together with the Corvette from the GT-A race, we entered the GT-C races. These races allowed us to go faster (though not so much in the slower GT C) and to fight tougher competitors. The more races we raced, the better we had to get. In particular, the challenges in each race increased from simple things like mastering a couple of corners and making a couple of clean overtakes during the race, to much trickier things like cleanly overtaking an opponent for 25 seconds. You need to improve as a driver to progress in the game, but the lessons are all built into the early races.

Previously, GT racing offered an invitational way to continue participating in challenging races in areas you were already good at. This mode includes special races that are unlocked by earning certain achievements through gameplay. Some events were unlocked by winning a certain number of events with a certain country's cars, while others required completing a number of clean races.

Then there are challenge modes that make things interesting. For example, a Formula E race in a fully electric car that handles like nothing you've ever driven before, or a Super Truck race where you've been driving a car with a low center of gravity your whole life and you're completely unprepared.

There is no shortage of events to complete in the campaign mode, but eventually you may end up completing them all. That's where the online game mode comes in: Project CARS 3 offers a classic online competitive mode called Quick Play Mode, which randomly throws you into races against other players. However, scheduled events are also available.

Scheduled events allow you to see what events will be held, what tracks you will be racing on, and what type of cars you will be racing. By signing up for an event ahead of time, we can get out on the track to set qualifying times, improve our grid position, and get a feel for the track and the cars. We signed up for one scheduled event and spent some time in one of the cars to master the track. We were ready for that event until we decided to switch to a "faster" car just before the event started, only to find that the gearing was completely different, making the ins and outs of each turn a whole new challenge. I managed to pick it up after a few laps, but it cost me a lot of positions.

Then came Rivalry mode. In this mode, you would take on daily, weekly, and monthly challenges. And you can only try a set number of times to get the top score. In Rivals, you can also see how your racing skills compare to other players and what kind of controllers and assists other players are using. Sometimes the challenges are in unfamiliar cars or on unfamiliar racetracks, testing your ability to outperform other racers. Finally, you can see your performance percentile against other players in the Project CARS 3 community. As I struggled to get out of bronze in many of the challenges, it was clear that I needed to continue to familiarize myself with more cars and tracks (although I didn't always use the majority of the 30 chances that some challenges offered). Eventually, I was able to find my sea legs, so to speak, in the Rainy Rivals Challenge. Having driven in the middle of winter for more than a few years in real life, we were well accustomed to the control and gentleness to the gas pedal needed to drive smoothly on the not-so-good roads. This allowed us to get into the top 50% of the Rivals ranking after only one attempt. Of course, we could have ranked even higher if we had kept trying and kept checking how well we could attack each corner.

And if the campaign events and online play are missing something, there is a custom event mode. There, you can set up any race you want, whether it's dozens of Formula E racing cars comically doing 99 laps around an almost absurdly small knock-hill tri-oval in the rain, or super trucks blasting through the city streets of Shanghai.

That said, I've played a lot of "Project CARS 3" and still feel that I've only scratched the surface of any racing experience, having yet to drive most of the 200+ cars.