Hey guys!
I have also got the game. I am playing with a Logitech Dual Action gamepad and I had no trouble setting the keys for it in the options menu. I just had to memorize which of the XBox keys shown in the game corresponds to which key on my pad.
The frame rate is locked to 30 FPS (just like in HP3) but the game has no problem to keep those 30 on ultra gfx settings on my new computer and I think everything is running smooth.
I finished the career mode on hard in about 5 hours without many problems. There are 4 difficulty levels but the hardest one is not available when you play the career for the first time. The out of car events are silly of course but there really aren't a lot of them. I think pretty much all of them have already been seen in trailers before the release.
The story is a fuc
king joke, lol. It is almost nonexistent. I would say all NFS from Underground to Undercover had just as many story elements as this game, if not more. So the hype from the developers regarding the story was completely unjustified. The cops also play almost no role in the game. They don't appear online and not in many races in the single player either and only with simple cars and roadblocks there.
In some career races you are hunted by cars or helicopters that fire at you and you have to dodge the bullets.
The challenge series took me another 5 hours to complete all the races. There are about 60 challenges, which are all variations of career tracks. So for single player you have a lot of Autologo speedwalls to practice for but there is no quickrace or anything like that.
There is no tuning but manual shifting is there this time and nitro is also there again. I am having trouble to find another game to compare the handling to. Somehow I would also say the gameplay feels most similiar to HP3 but the drifting thing is gone, so the driving is actually quite a bit different. I would say the cars just don't feel as heavy as in HP3. They feel a lot more light.
My game also crashed 3 or 4 times and most of the times my controller settings were gone after that.
The multiplayer mode is ridiculous. There are only public sessions, NO private games are possible. And you can NOT choose which tracks you want to play. The game only gives the players a choice between two random events (cups with several races) and they can then vote for one of them. That is all the choice you have. You can create a playgroup of up to 4 people to join a session with friends but it will still be a public session without track choice and with other random players in it.
I mean the online mode was still fun for me but it is completely useless if you would want to do a serious competition like WCG or whatever with the game. It is really only good for public casual play just for fun.
A lot of cars are still locked for me. They really made it that you need to play for quite a while before you unlock everything. You need to play the career again on extreme, get all platinum medals in the challenge series, beat many Autolog recommendations and play a ton online. You can also reach driver level 30 at least and I am only 17 so far.
And yes, there is this permanent voice chat online and it really seems that it can not be turned off. There is absolutely no setting for it (the options menu is almost as small again as in HP3).
I played my first 2 hours in multiplayer yesterday and I recorded everything, so if you didn't get the game yet and want to see how the multiplayer experience is like, you can take a look at my videos.
There are 9 such parts on my channel, so that should be more than enough content to get a good impression of the online gameplay.
If you have any other questions about the game, feel free to ask.
I can't comment on playing with wheel though because I am happy playing with gamepad.