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)
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)