This is currently on sale in Steam, 75% off. I'd say it's easily worth a fiver or so...
I got it early this week and have been playing it for a few days, I quite like it... A few specific thoughts:
- The difficulty is fine. I'm playing with hard difficulty and pro settings, using my xbox 360 pad, and haven't had any issues with it so far (I'm about 15% into the game). I've had to take a few stabs at some of the hot lap challenges, but that's what you'd expect for a hard difficulty. The race challenges are ridiculously easy, though. I'm generally between five and ten seconds a lap faster than all the AI drivers.
- The driving model. I quite like the physics with the old cars, a nice mix of handling in a realistic way but still being quite easy and fun to drive. Haven't driven the newer cars much yet, though, so I'll reserve judgement.
- Pad steering. It's quite bad, really... It generally feels slow and floaty, mostly because it centers quite slowly and does not react consistently to the inputs. Sometimes it also does odd things. For example, I was driving through a left-right esses at Misty Loch and after the lefthander I was on a bit of a slight slide when I needed to start turning right, the game presumably assumed that I wanted to correct the slide and gave me about two degrees of steering lock when I needed full lock to take the righthander. Which caused me to go straight off the track. I've had the same problems multiple times.
- Career mode. I quite like. There is good variety, but maybe a bit too many repeated missions (multiple races on same track with same car in a row). However, I haven't seen any odd scripted events described above yet.
- Graphics. I like.
- Sounds. I really like.
- Circuits. I really, really like. Driving around Rouen, old Monza and old Silverstone is like meeting with old friends from the GPL days.
So yeah, it ain't a sim and the steering can be aggravating, but overall I still like it. A bargain for 5?.