Remember how I called 2013 the perfect swan song for the seventh console generation? That's because I was pretending this game didn't exist. In fact, I'd like to keep pretending it doesn't... but I have things to say, so it has to exist at least for a little while.

I have seen some people claim that this is the worst game Codemasters has ever made. I think that's complete and total nonsense for two reasons. First, it just isn't, not when DIRT 5 exists. Second, it's not even that bad in general.

Don't get me wrong, I hate this game and will never play it again, but playing it didn't give me a visceral reaction of disgust, I didn't feel like I was wasting precious minutes of my finite life while playing it, and I didn't feel dead inside. Dirt 5 made me feel all of those things. My reaction to this game was "oh, I get it," and nothing more. The fact of the matter is, this is the same game as 2013, which was the same game as 2012. It still has a career mode with good progression, which automatically places this game above a lot of modern racing games. It may be (probably is) the worst Codemasters F1 game, and potentially one of the worst F1 games in general from any developer, but even so, it's... acceptable. If this was your first F1 game and you're good enough at video games to pick it up while also not being particularly experienced with racing sims, you would probably be fine with it, maybe even really enjoy it.

The problem is playing it with a frame of reference.

I don't want to get caught up in tearing this game apart, because quite frankly it's not worth that kind of time or effort, so instead I'm going to tear apart two specific aspects of it.

First is sound. How could they get it so wrong? Yes, the first generation V6 engines sounded bad in real life, but not this bad... but that's not the worst part by a long shot. I nitpicked about the volume level of certain audio cues in 2013 being so quiet they were practically inaudible, and some of those cues are actually audible again, which is good... but now the radio is so quiet that it's impossible to understand more than 10% of the words if there's another car within a mile of you, because other car engines are louder than your own, and even when you're alone, it's still a huge struggle to hear him. The sound of your own tires is louder than your engine too, and I don't mean tire squeal from spinning out or sliding, I mean the sound the tires make while taking a turn normally. To top it all off, there's so much background noise in every race that it's actually kind of disorienting. There's a constant hum of engines from all the other cars on track, no matter where they are, which is rich considering that even the V10 engines weren't that loud, plus a constant crowd noise making it feel like being in a packed convention center. Horrible.

Second, the obvious, is control. I will only briefly mention three things on this topic, and it should be more than enough to make the point clear.

One: The tires are always cold, no matter what. Conservative driving, aggressive driving, even constant swerving in an attempt to warm the tires, it doesn't matter, they're always cold, which means the car will always majorly understeer or oversteer, no middle ground. The AI doesn't seem to be affected by this.

Two: The cars feel extremely heavy and slow. Which they are, the cars got 2-5 seconds slower in real life this year, but that's still understating it. In this game, they feel like they weigh as much as GT cars, and by combining that with the lack of grip, it feels like even though the cars are responsive to your inputs, they only ever respond halfway. The AI doesn't seem to be affected by this.

Three: I could not tell the difference between dry and wet conditions. It felt exactly the same. Seconds slower, sure, but it was no more difficult, and I never felt like there was any less grip. It was just slower, almost like the wet weather is purely visual and the intermediate tires are just worse primes. The AI doesn't seem to be affected by this.

It's almost like annually released games are a bad and stupid thing that shouldn't happen.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2014)