Well golly, this sure does feel like the exact same game as 2017, but with more music, a reporter, less graphical ugliness that may or may not have been a glitch anyway, simultaneously better and worse audio, a simultaneously slightly better and worse interface, faster research, more interesting handling, more sensitive car damage, and more aggressive - but not more challenging - AI.

So before, I said that 2016 was the game 2015 should have been, and 2017 was the game that should have been what 2016 should have been, but I take it back, 2016 is still what 2015 should have been but 2017 is actually not what 2016 should have been, 2018 should have been 2017 which then is what 2016 should have been since 2018 is just a minimal iteration on 2017. Confused enough? This is by far the smallest, least significant iteration in the series, even 2013 was a bigger jump from 2012, before considering the inclusion of classics. The biggest change is that the cars have halos now. It could have been the mid-season contract negotiations, but as far as I'm concerned, that's more of an illusion than a real addition as implemented. It's almost like annually released games are a bad and stupid thing that shouldn't happen.

So anyway, I'm not going to bother explaining anything about this game in great detail because it truly is just a slightly more refined 2017 in some ways, identical in others, and disappointing in a few places.

For instance, in the presentation department, 2016 had some great personality, then 2017 stripped a lot of it away and felt cold, and this game seems to be trying to get the personality back... but it still feels cold. Even colder in some ways for that matter. It's odd. The reporter is interesting, bringing back the interviews from so many games past, except now they allegedly have some effects. Unfortunately, I simply do not care. The interviews are just as repetitive and uneventful as they were in 2010 and 2011, there is no substance here and it doesn't appeal to me. The workstation being in the team data center with your teammate seated in front of you is more interesting in the sense that it's novel for the series, but I do miss seeing each unique environment in the background between races... so again, one step forward and one step backward. The addition of more music in more places is a welcome one, filling out the boring crowd noise from 2017, but the music itself is hardly worth a mention, which is tragic considering how good the music in past games has been. Graphically, I can't tell at all if this game is actually better than 2017 or not, because I still don't know if all of my problems with 2017 were real or glitches, but I'm at least glad that all the glitches are gone... except for one, my car still has afterimages behind it. Not a big deal though, that's definitely just a problem on my end. Another annoying change is that the interface, while being slightly better looking in general, is also slightly harder to actually see thanks to the shift lights in the corner becoming even less visible, which has been an ever increasing problem for almost every single entry of the series for me.

Where it all comes crashing down is the problem of sound, which is is unforgivable. The mixing, the levels, the detail of the various minor sound effects, the audio cues, the positional audio in replays, these are all improved, which is great, but it's all meaningless since the engine sound while driving is downright awful. It's painful. It's gross. The engines sound thin, sharp, fake, and flat, all at once. I hate it. It makes the game feel so much worse to play, even though I can tell that it should feel better thanks to all the refinements, both in the rest of the audio and otherwise. This is the worst engine audio in the whole series, I'm convinced. Even 2014 sounded better. It might even be the worst engine audio of all Codemasters games. On top of that, the sound the car makes when driving with worn parts is now the most annoying sound in the world, because it just rattles like a cheap plastic car interior, and unless you want to take the grid penalties, you will be driving with worn parts for most of the first season, so you get to deal with the constant invisible rattling that apparently wasn't bad enough in just real life. I genuinely wanted to drop the game because of this, so I played almost all of the season as 5 lap races even though I was prepared and willing to do all 25%. Irredeemable. This was one step forward and a whole gymnastics performance backward. It's baffling. The fact that the audio accessibility option to reduce high frequencies also still isn't present has me starting to believe that the only reason they included that in 2016 is because they knew they made something awful, which would be some tasty irony.

Now... the anger is out of my system. I may not have enjoyed my time with this game very much, because I really wasn't exaggerating about how much I hate the new engine sounds, but I will admit that I've been harsher than what this game deserves. Yes, it's the smallest iteration in the series yet, but it's a good iteration. It makes 2017 redundant. If the sound was better, even if they just used the exact same sounds from the previous game, I would have pretended 2017 didn't exist since 2018 is just that game but better and that would have been funny, I think.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2018)