Circuits really need to be learnt in order for you to obtain any level of success, and there’s a certain pressure that comes from racing right on the limit, trying to shave extra milliseconds off your sector times every single time you head into a bend. Add that to the frankly bizarre sepia-toned camera (apparently we didn’t have colour televisions in the 1990s), and you’ve got something that falls remarkably short, given that it’s the only major bullet point to be found in this year’s game.įortunately for Codemasters, the F1 series generally provides one of the most challenging and downright entertaining handling models that we’ve seen in a motorsport game for some time, and that’s no different here. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s something jarring about taking over as Alain Prost in a 1981 Williams with Alan Jones as your team-mate, when they were fierce rivals given that Prost was driving for Renault at the time. So instead of Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto driving the 1988 Ferrari, you get Berger and Michael Schumacher, who didn’t even drive an F1 car until 1991. You get a driver that competed in that car in that specific year, paired with a “team legend” that also raced for that constructor at some point. Thirdly, the team and driver setups are just plain strange. You can race them in one-off races against in events that feature only 10 or 12 runners (the 1986 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch featured 26 drivers, for the record), take them out for a spin in time trial mode, or take part in a few “scenarios” that all consist of “you must win this race.” What else you’d be trying to do, we don’t know. Secondly, there’s a distinct lack of things to do with the classic cars. Firstly, if you don’t buy the “Classic Edition” of the game or alternatively purchase a DLC code, you don’t get access to half the classic tracks, or the drivers from the 1990s. But even this mode appears to be half-hearted. A handful of classic tracks have been added too, allowing you to blaze around Brands Hatch and Estoril in Nigel Mansell’s Williams for example, after listening to a short introduction from commentating legend Murray Walker. The main new draw this year is the ability to race some classic F1 cars of yesteryear. Fancy doing the Young Driver's Test at Yas Marina again? No, we didn't either. When you add that to the fact that there’s very, very little else in terms of improvements to be found, that’s not a good situation for the franchise to be in. Unfortunately though, the AI appears to be all but unchanged. If Codemasters had done nothing else but fix the AI, throw in technical failures (which they’re working on for a future version of the game, we’re told – so look forward to handing over more cash, won’t you?) and given us realistic driver retirements in F1 2013, we would have paid the asking price and been happy to do it. Similar results occurred throughout the season, with drivers only ever being put out of the race if we purposefully crunched them into a wall or if they barged our car by trying to go for a gap that wasn’t there (which happens far, far too much) and span out.įocusing on the AI as the opening gambit may well seem to be a strange thing to do, but given how darned good the series is in practically every other aspect, it’s the only thing that we were praying was fixed this time around. All 21 AI drivers qualified within a handful of seconds of each other, and despite consistent heavy rain throughout the race, not a single car retired. In a rain-soaked second race at the Malaysian Grand Prix in Kuala Lumpur though, things were back to normal. Given that we didn’t see the safety car once during four or five seasons of play in F1 2012, things were looking up. In our first career race – the Australian GP – an early pile-up (that we – ahem - may or may have not caused) saw the safety car come out and three drivers retire. Initially, we thought things had improved. Which is why it’s strange to see that in a title that otherwise so accurately models the F1 experience, and which does so unbelievably little to improve things over last year’s version of the game, Codemasters still insist on having AI cars that rarely put a foot wrong and most certainly never do anything that will cause them to be put out of the race. We were close this year, with only one failing to finish in the Belgian GP, but all of the other races in the 2013 season so far have featured between three and seven retirements. The 1961 Dutch GP, the 2005 Italian GP, the controversial 2005 US GP (which only had six starters) and the 2011 European GP. In the history of Formula One racing, there have been only four Grands Prix that have ended with as many runners as have started.
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