Switchback Pass Will Not Let You Stop, And Its Best Frames Are All Taken By Somebody Who Has Already Lost

Every driving game with a photo mode faces the same contradiction: the moments worth photographing are the moments you cannot afford to stop for. Most of them resolve it by letting you pause anyway, which produces an enormous quantity of frozen mid-corner frames in which a car is doing something dramatic and nothing else in the image means anything.

Switchback Pass refuses. There is no pause-and-compose during a race, at all, on any difficulty. The photo mode exists only in free roam and in replays, and it took about four hours to stop resenting this and start recognising it as the correct decision.

The replay camera nobody mentions

It is not sold as a photographic tool. It is a driving-line analysis feature, buried two menus deep, with a scrub bar and a set of preset angles aimed at showing you where you braked too early. It also happens to be the best camera in this issue after Causeway's.

The free-fly in replay mode has an unlimited radius, moves smoothly at three speeds, and — crucially — the time scrub is frame-accurate. You can find a moment, stop time entirely, and then spend as long as you like moving around a completely static world with headlights still lit and dust still hanging.

What it lacks is glass. There is no aperture control and no focal length slider, so everything is rendered at the same middling wide angle with everything in focus. That is a real limitation and it is why the score for tools is six rather than nine: the positioning is excellent, the optics are absent.

Why sixteen and not sixty

Because the world is very good and the light is unreliable. Switchback Pass has genuine dynamic weather and a real day cycle, which is more than Causeway manages, but you do not get to choose when either occurs. There is no time-of-day override, so the mountain you want to photograph at dusk is available at dusk only when the game decides.

Eleven of the sixteen kept frames are from the same three-hour session, because that session happened to run through the evening with clearing weather after rain. The remaining ten hours of driving that week produced two keepers between them.

That table is the most useful thing in this review. The same road, the same camera, the same driver: eleven and a half per cent in one condition and six-tenths of a per cent in another. A photo mode did not produce that spread. Weather did.

Nothing in a photo mode can be substituted for a sky that changes. Nineteen games' worth of evidence says so, and this one road says it in a single afternoon.

What refusing to stop actually achieves

Two things, both good. The first is that it removes the worst genre of driving-game screenshot entirely. There are no frozen-drift frames in this log because there could not be, and I do not miss them; a car sideways at the apex is a pose rather than a photograph, and every driving game on the market is full of them.

The second is that it forces the camera into the replay, which is where a road can actually be seen. A driver's eye is eighteen inches above the tarmac facing forwards. Almost everything interesting about a mountain switchback — the stacked bends, the drop, the relationship between the road and the valley — is invisible from there and obvious from ninety metres up.

Fourteen of the sixteen kept frames are elevated. Not one is at driving height. In a game that let me pause mid-corner, I suspect the ratio would be reversed and the keepers would be worse.

The complaints

The replay buffer holds one race. Finish a second event and the first is gone, with no export and no way to mark a moment for later. Two of my best-remembered frames from this game do not exist because I drove another stage before going back for them.

The menu placement is genuinely bad. Nothing in the interface suggests the replay camera is worth opening for any reason other than lap analysis, and I found it by accident in the fourth hour. A game with a camera this capable should not be hiding it behind a telemetry submenu.

And free roam, which is where you would expect to compose deliberately, has no weather control either. So the mode designed for looking is subject to the same lottery as the mode designed for racing.

What it is worth

Six for tools is generous on positioning and harsh on optics, and I would defend both halves. Eight for the world is for terrain that separates into planes without help — pines against mist against ridge against sky — which is exactly what Causeway's continent cannot do at any focal length.

The kept ratio of four per cent sits mid-table and undersells the game, because that figure is dominated by a hundred and seventy overcast frames taken while learning the stages. Restricted to the conditions where photography was viable, this is the second-best game in the issue.