Aight this one of the games I own on steam. And also one of the best ones in the series, the best so far actually and not by a bit.

F1 2012 is where the series really came alive and codemasters made the formula (hA) properly work.

There's new modes, the best handling so far, improvements all around, none of the previous ones beat this one at anything really. Except maybe the main menu which has been simplified a lot? If you care...who does tho lol.

Anyway.

The handling finds a nice balance between the overwhelming challenge of F1 2010 and the overwhelming... easiness (if thats a term?) of F1 2011. It is very similar in feeling to 2011 but it feels much better, you spin easier but it's not bullshit like in 2010.

There's a tutorial which is nice and teaches you everything you need to know about F1 to get started. Is it painfully boring for someone who knows how to play these games half decently? Yes, does it matter? Eh.

What about the modes? The standard career is here and mostly unchanged, AI is easier (won the championship with Williams playing on the harder difficulties lmao) and aghhhhhh...more options for starting teams?

Then there's the new stuff, firstly the best addition imo which is the champions mode. This requires a bit of context of the actual sport. 2012 was a very special year for F1, there was tough competition all year and all the front running teams were on it. First 7 races, 7 different winners. A tight championship battle that went to the last race between Sebastian Vettel in the dominant Red Bull and Fernando Alonso in the dogshit Ferrari somehow putting that truck in the championship fight and losing by a few points.

Where does this inspire this champions mode? Well 2012 was also a year with 6 different champions on the grid. A historic grid for sure. So they made a scenario mode around it and it is fantastic. Agh it is perhaps a bit easy but honestly I don't mind. It's a brilliant idea.

You're put in interesting scenarios, you got new tires at the end of the race, make up ground. You gamble and put on full wet tires after a safety car, you find yourself struggling at the start then catching car after car as you're the fastest man on track.

Hamilton put on new tires and is hunting you down while you're on much older tires so you have to defend from him till the end.

And at the end you get a race with all 6 champions at the (at the time) new American track Circuit of the Americas. It's great.

The other new mode is season challenge which is a simplified career where you pick a target, beat them and you steal their seat. You do that 5 times throughout the season, races are shorter here which fits the idea, being more of a quick fire mode.

Besides that only returning features, time trial, time attack (time trial scenarios with medals), co-op career is here tho I think it was in last years game too, havent tried it cuz who tf am I gonna convince to drop 20 bucks on a key for this game lol.

Oh also it's the first game with like...good graphics, first one had decent textures but awful art style, 2nd had better art style but the textures kinda suck. This one's got both colour and decent textures lol.

So yeah, as an F1 game, it's the closest to a whole package that the series has come too so far.

Surprisingly, this is the first game in the series with anything resembling a tutorial. It doesn't do a great job of actually teaching the player how to control the car, which seems kind of important since these cars are so hard to drive, especially since the game also defaults to having all assists turned off, but at least it tells you what DRS and KERS are and how they work, unlike the last game, and gives you a couple little challenges to practice with before you start your career. It also introduces flashbacks, something that wasn't present in the previous two entries that I was very happy to see since being able to undo race-ending mistakes a couple times could save me a lot of time.

The time savings of having working flashbacks was kind of undone by the career mode being lengthened, though. The shortest race length is now 25% rather than 20%, which may not be a big change but would definitely add up, and the only way to have a practice session before the race is to do the full long weekend, meaning up to three qualifying rounds, and since the difficulty seems lower at times in this game than in 2011, making it past the first round and having to do more laps wasn't impossible for me with Williams... but I'd much rather have one-shot qualifying with a practice session, like before. No idea why that isn't an option. It's even more frustrating since the game locks out nearly all of the setup options after you hit the track the first time in qualifying, so the only way to test setups on a short weekend is to restart the session after every adjustment. Heck, it's even worse when going with the one-shot qualifying option, because you only have access to the quick setup slider, not the actual tuning menu. I did end up qualifying 18th most of the time anyway though, just like the last game, sometimes because the cars ahead of me were just plain faster, other times because I just didn't want to do another qualifying session and knew I'd do far better in the race anyway, like the time I qualified 18th and then spent the entire race in 2nd without even resorting to any dirty tricks... aside from the usual "brake later than everybody and divebomb the whole pack in the first corner" strategy.

The controls are a bit weird, coming from 2011. The cars feel heavy, but still responsive, and despite also feeling tighter and less floaty, it's easier to slide. I also really don't like that this game cuts your engine if you go off track, because while I understand the desire to keep players from driving wildly and taking shortcuts, I also don't like being further punished for making mistakes that are already punishing... and there are already penalties for corner cutting anyway, so why is this here? I preferred 2011's handling over 2010, but I prefer 2010's handling over 2012 for sure. Another weird mixed bag of a change is the sound, because while some of the sound design is definitely better, the mixing is definitely worse. The engineer gets drowned out not by engine noise, but by the wind, because wind noise is the loudest thing in the mix for some unholy reason. The wind noise almost completely disappears when you activate DRS, which is an interesting idea, but it would have been just as interesting if the normal wind noise was like 25% of the volume it is. The engines of other cars are also louder, to the point that it's quite difficult to shift gears correctly during race starts because all I can hear is other cars.

Aside from all that, graphics are another small step forward, loading times are significantly improved to the point that I could boot this game up and click all the way through into a race and be on track in less time than 2011 takes just to load the garage, the UI is even less cool but admittedly much more clear and fast, fuel management is much more forgiving now so if you were to only use the standard fuel map you would never have to worry about running out of fuel by the end like what happened to me twice in 2011, and... that's about it. It's just another iteration. Though I must say, the overall presentation in this game is probably the best so far. The cool menus may not be there, but the original music is much better, more fitting, and more plentiful, and there's more interesting information about different races and such sprinkled in there, including a turn-by-turn talk through video for each track. 2011 was a full step backwards in the presentation department, so this felt very good. Also, pit stops actually work now, so going in for my tire change no longer felt like gambling my race away, which was wonderful. Something else that actually works now is the game itself, which was also wonderful. No more constant crashing... only one crash. And some odd stuttering here and there. Close enough.

Also I'd like to quickly nitpick Yas Marina and Circuit of the Americas in this game. Yas Marina seems to be absolutely covered in tire marbles, to the point that I had to turn on the full racing line so I could stick precisely to it, because deviating from the racing line by millimeters meant driving in the marbles at times. Hated that. Circuit of the Americas, meanwhile, has the worst track limits I've ever seen. There are plenty of times on any track where I would clearly cut a corner and not be warned for it, but never could I get away with something so severe as literally skipping an entire corner until this track... and then at the same time, on one of the last corners, I did get warned for corner cutting multiple times... on the outside. And I wasn't even off track, I just had two wheels on the curb, and that was enough for a warning. Baffling.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2012)

Uma das melhores temporadas

O jogo é bem bom e até hoje é muito bonito. A única coisa feia desse jogo, nem é culpa do game em si, que é sobre o layout dos carros. A temporada de 2012 teve um dos carros mais feios de todos os tempos, simplesmente horrível aquele bico dianteiro de muitos carros.

Mas falando sobre o jogo, ele é bem divertido, conta com algumas das ideias que vemos até hoje nos modos carreira dos jogos de F1 da Codemasters, mas obviamente mais simplórias. O design de algumas pistas é bem diferente tbm, Mônaco por exemplo tem muito mais irregularidades na pista do que em qualquer outro jogo do corrida feito pela desenvolvedora.

A temporada de 2012 contou também com uma ótima seleção de pistas e com um plantel de pilotos maravilhoso. O auge de Vettel na disputa com Alonso, Hamilton e Button na Mclaren, Bruno Senna fazendo o nome Senna aparecer novamente e a despedida do grande Schumacher. Sem dúvida alguma, muitos nomes de peso.

Agora, se tudo isso combinado tivesse também o fator dirigibilidade e dificuldade bem atrelado ao game, aí seria nota muito maior, mas infelizmente o game peca nesses aspectos.

Quanto a dirigibilidade, algumas vezes a direção nas curvas é bem imprecisa e travar os pneus é bem fácil, fazendo com que as tangências de curvas sejam estranhas a cada volta, pois o carro facilmente se comporta de maneiras diferentes, mesmo que você freie no mesmo ponto da pista.

Já sobre a dificuldade, é muito fácil (mesmo jogando com IA no difícil) de você largar atrás e ainda na primeira volta ou na primeira curva, ultrapassar um monte de gente. Além disso, IA não te desafia em praticamente nenhum momento. Diferente dos jogos mais atuais, ela não se defende, não troca de linhas e não ataca. Existindo a possibilidade, é fácil demais de passar e de defender posição, pois é uma IA passiva, independentemente de dificuldade.

Não deu pra evoluir muito no game e no modo carreira pelas imprecisões que aconteceram no guiar dos carros e na dificuldade pouco desafiadora.