Agh I don't get this one.

While codemasters first proper attempt at an F1 game sees them capture the atmosphere of the sport very well especially with the paddock main menu screen I cannot lie it was not enjoyable.

I think the biggest issue is that you can only start with the 3 new teams for 2010, HRT, Virgin and Lotus. These 3 teams were beyond awful, HRT could never trouble the top 18 let alone top 10, I'm pretty sure Virgin somehow managed to make a car that wasn't able to hold enough fuel to last the entire race and Lotus' biggest mistake was simply having a slow and terrible car.

These teams were good for the sport but in the game them being your only option makes the whole thing dull and the game never comes alive unless you are ready to put in the time and wait around for a couple of seasons of not being able to do much.

I didn't finish the career, gave up a couple of races in, wasn't enjoyable. In qualifying I could easily get into the top 10, putting together that flying lap eventually but in the races everything would go wrong every single time. It has the same issue F1 23 has somehow.

The racing most of the time is atrocious, in qualifying you're quick, in the races it's all about defending until a pit stop knocks you out of a top 10 finish, top 15, hell even a top 20 sometimes.

It's not that bad in F1 23, but here it is that bad. The pit stops ruin the experience, you can never really be the underdog getting the crutial point because when you enter the pit if another car or god forbit another few cars come in at the same time as you, you will 100% of the time have a 10+ sec pit stop, waiting around for cars to pass you and losing positions you can never get back. It's the Haas 2023 experience made into a whole game. So then you think fine I'll come in early and try to avoid other cars but then the cars terrible pace shows in the fact by the time a lap or 2 pass and they're coming in, they always come out way ahead of you. Seriously I couldn't believe my race in China where I was fighting with the big teams for a podium finish, come into the pit, come out 20th, and end up 15th. All that work for nothing and I had decent pace, made few mistakes, but they all were just way faster and there wasn't any point in trying anymore.

Lowering the difficulty only helped in qualifying really. I'll admit I was struggling with the handling and wasn't enjoying the very understeery feel of the cars. But fucking hell I wasn't doing that bad. In spain I was flying through the corners, it's a track I know I'm good at, I'm good at it in every racing game I've seen the track in...but that didn't stop me from fading away after the first pit stop. Yeah it's realistic but what isn't realistic is those 3 teams being the only choices, there's other teams that welcome rookies too, Force Indie, Williams, god damn Torro Rosso which exists specifically for rookies, Sauber even Mclaren if you want a top team example. I mean come on now.

I like the idea of only having a few teams to choose from at the start, simply taking the red bull and running away with it isn't that fun but its infinitely more fun than being in a Lotus, qualifying in the top 10 every race then finishing 18th every race.

There's certain liberties you have to take with video game adaptations of sports, one of which is that underdogs should be able to win, at least on lower difficulties (or the lowest ffs). Here it's a bit too hard.

The driving is also extremely punishing, touch a kurb and you'll be violently spinning around every time. Easy to avoid on certain tracks but others not so, especially when the racing line pretty much tells you to ride the fucking kerb which then sends you into the wall AGH it's annoying.

The racing line in this game might just be the worst I've ever seen, genuinely never thought that'd be something I'd complain about but it tells you to brake like a million miles away from when you actually need to brake. Tells you to take lines that might just send you in the wall (fucking kerbs). I'd rec you turn it off but unless you already know the circuits it's prb not worth it either. I went in all confident without the racing line in the Bahrain GP only to find out it's a different layout, into a spin I went, then in a wall...That one was on me though, back then that was the Bahrain GP layout. So that wasn't an annoyance, the real one was during the race when I spun out, hit a wall, wanted to use a flashback and it only took me as far as when I was JUST about to hit the wall...great.

Agh what else is there...so racing isn't fun, driving itself is a bit of a headache (hard and very understeery blegh), the artstyle is an atrocity to mankind, in a sport that goes all around the world to different countries and continents, having every single circuit look the same is an insult (360 generation grey artstyle always looked bad and here it's just as bad as in any other game). But the menu is good so...yeah not enough actually who could have guessed.

Codemasters games around this time never did it for me and this one isn't much of an exception. I could forgive a lot if the driving was at least fun but I wasn't enjoying this one. Maybe I didn't give it enough time but you'd think 7 hours into a racing game it'd have gotten better at some point.

Just let me drive a car that isn't a year off the pace for crying out loud.

Jumping straight from DIRT Rally 2.0 to this was quite an experience, let me tell you. All color has disappeared, gone. I'll never understand why anybody thought it was a good idea around this time for all games to be desaturated yellow and brown, because everything everywhere all looks the same and it's almost genuinely upsetting to look at. Delete that filter and bring the color back, and the graphical fidelity of this game is good enough that if it only had some higher resolution textures, I'd be perfectly fine having this alongside more modern games, especially when considering that this game also natively supports 21:9 displays and high refresh rates without issue like so many of today's games still don't.

The menus are fantastic in this game too, it's got that same 3D in-world thing going on that DIRT 2 has, and I absolutely love it. Between the awesome menus through the paddock and the pits, and the relatively minimal yet perfectly handled soundtrack, this game presents itself so well (excluding the terrible color choices) that it almost instantly sparked within me a real interest in the sport. Honestly, I wasn't excited to play these games at first, but after getting into this one, that started to change. That's the power of presentation baby, today's developers could learn a thing or two from that. Although, it must be said that I would be remiss not to point out the quite short time that effect lasts, because the whole experience becomes extremely repetitive and dry after a few hours.

The next thing that really captured my interest was the moment I found out just how big of a difference there is between the teams. I always knew some teams had advantages over others, and I knew there was a big gap between the leaders and the backmarkers, but I didn't realize just how huge it could be. I picked HRT as my team, and on the third race of the season, got frustrated with my performance and quit. I played on the hardest difficulty with medium traction control, and I was consistently at the back of the pack the whole time... until it rained during qualifying in Malaysia. In the rain, I nearly qualified pole.

Until that moment, I thought it was just a skill issue since in the actual races I could still catch people in certain corners and avoid dead last so long as I didn't spin out, but seeing the massive difference in the rain made me suspect that it might be the car instead, because I didn't even notice a difference between the dry and the wet. Sure enough, I tried out the Virgin Racing and Lotus cars on the same track in time trial mode, and while the Virgin car was noticeably but not significantly better all around, the Lotus was in a whole other league... and in real life, that team didn't score a single point! The HRT car is just that bad. At least, it is for me. Maybe it can be fixed with a better setup, but I don't care enough to learn how to set cars up optimally in this game.

After restarting the career mode with team Lotus, the game really came alive. Having removed the frustration of battling a terrible car, what replaced that was a satisfying thrill that no other racing simulation can offer. Whether it's for the win, a single point, the team objective, or just to stay out of last, driving cars as ridiculous as these on the edge of control at speeds no other car can come close to reaching is an incredibly exciting challenge that makes every race fun. Or extremely frustrating. There is very little room for error, and one mistake often means losing everything you worked for in a race, like when I qualified fifth on my second attempt at Malaysia, performed well for nine and a half laps, then slightly overdid the last corner and spun right at the end of the second to last lap - yes I'm playing on 20% length because I have no desire to spend 800 hours of my life playing ten F1 games - dropping me all the way to the back of the pack. Which is even more likely to happen when your pit crew makes terrible calls and has you stop for tires too early in the race.

And speaking of the pit crew, the engineer is really annoying, constantly telling me I'm "just five seconds" behind the car that's inches in front of me, saying my engine is too hot only for it to turn green again before he finishes talking, or telling me "move off the racing line to get your bearings" every single time I end up behind another car in the wet, or telling me to look at my teammate's setup and copy it to my car even though I'm pretty sure that isn't possible at all in the game, and refusing to let me out of the pits if there's another car within a mile of me, sometimes to the point that they actually let cars behind me pull up, finish their pit stop, and start driving again before they let me out, making every pit stop a gamble where the stakes can be my entire race... a gamble I frequently lost. Even more annoying is the random tire puncture mechanic, because there is never any warning, it's completely random, and it ruins the race. Especially when it happens in sector one on the final lap of the race when I'm in the front of the pack. This is one part of realism that I think is better off gone, or at least made optional.

Oh, also there are no lights on screen at the start of each race, so unless you qualify at the front of the pack and can see the actual lights, you just have to hope for the best. That's real nice. Also the head camera has an obscene amount of vertical shake happening at all times which makes it impossible to use. Which is also real nice. And the AI is very stupid also, going way too slow for some corners and way faster than I ever can in the straights, and will often run into me, and of course the resulting collision penalty will go to me, because the penalties in this game are random and nonsensical. I'm also sure that the AI is cheating a bit too much. A little is fine and completely understandable, some AI cheating can make racing games a lot more fun for the player after all, but it often seems like no matter what I do or what car I'm in, every AI driver is faster than me in the straights and has more grip in the corners that they don't deliberately take too slowly. I'd make a joke about how much it sounds like I'm making racing driver excuses, but the thing is, I'm not, I swears it.

In online competition, I'm no sore loser, but I must admit, I am a bit of a sore loser in offline competitive games like these, so even though most of the fun in this game comes from simply driving the cars and fighting to stay in control of them at race speed, my mood gets soured a bit when I get passed enough times by cars that seem to have an unfair advantage, when I make a mistake or get spun out at the end of a race or several times at the beginning without the ability to use flashbacks, or when I get penalized for things that either didn't happen, weren't my fault, or weren't worth the penalty at all. So for one race, I turned the difficulty down from expert to hard, and not only did that completely remove the tire wear mechanic, it also lowered the AI difficulty so far that I went from the back of the pack to absolute dominance in first place in a Lotus. So, effectively, my only two choices for AI difficulty are unfairly fast or unfairly slow. Which I don't really mind in this game, fortunately, but then Monaco comes up and even with the difficulty dropped and traction control on full, other cars still out-grip and out-brake me dramatically.

Overall, for every good point this game has, a bad point meets it. For all the fun I have with it, I have equal frustration. When the racing is good, it's great, but when it's bad, it's painful. It's a better game than I imagined but not as good as it could have been. And of course, being an annual series, I know there will be better games down the line, but I'm now dreading what the low points will be like if this is the baseline.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2010)