I've played through two race weekends and am in the middle of the Australian GP and so far the team management part of the game looks good, lots of detail but not too obscure to figure it out. The actual race weekend stuff, well, it is as I thought, a lot of sizzle but the steak is not that good. Not that it's bad, but considering the history of racing management sims out there, Frontier had a lot of examples to look at to figure out how to do justice to their Formula One license. And I think they have come up short.
Sure, there are a lot of pretty camera views, but you aren't watching cars actually race, but rather a graphical representation of their position on the track calculated by an algorithm (
good gosh, I spelled algorithm without using spell check!). So what appears to be two cars fighting side by side is really the calculation showing that they are running just about the same speed. I've watched two cars run side by side for a lap or more where in real life they would never be able to do so. Again, not that it's bad, but
Motorsport Manager actually did this better with actual passing attempts and completed passes.
As for having audio clips from the drivers and the race engineers, these get repetitive really quick, since they use the same ones over and over
. Only in an unusual situation do you actually hear something new, like Lance Stroll cursing (it is actually bleeped
) when he gets passed.
The audio commentary by David Croft, the main F1 commentator for Sky Sports, again suffers from repetitiveness and the need for the audio clips to be generic, like "
there's a lockup" or "
[_____] has spun!". And some of them are downright silly, like Crofty saying that there's be a catastrophic crash and the replay shows one car clipping the wing of another. The replays I do have to say are pretty nice, although again generic, a spin is the same sequence except the overlay of the graphics of the car changes. Again, not that it's bad, but it feels like it could have been better.
And another thing I feel where the developer didn't get it right was the practice sessions. You can just let the game simulate them for you and that's fine. But if you want to manually run them yourself, you end up with what was already very gamey in
Motorsport Manager, you adjust sliders, let the drivers run a while, adjust the sliders again, etc. It is just not appealing to watch or to even spend time on. At least in
Motorsport Manager you could concentrate on race pace or certain tires or wet weather running. And in
Motorsport Manager there was a method to be picked up where in three runs you'd nail the setup while in this game it just seems like you are just really doing a pure game of hit or miss.
But to go back to the nicer parts, the way finances are handled in the game is done well, you can fairly easily understand cost caps and part development costs, stuff like that. And car part development and manufacturing is presented very well too. As a business management game it feels good so far.
So, in summary, if you have been watching that Netflix F1 series and would like to get a good feel of what that world is like, this is a pretty decent way to get a feel for it. I've had a lot of quibbles listed above, but I'm approaching it from the standpoint of some who has spent hundreds of hours over the years watching F1 and so tend to be rather critical. I suspect most folks would find it an enjoyable game and really I do too