I couldn't play this game. Just wouldn't launch. It even has a native linux port, but not only did it not work, I found reports from many people saying that the native version runs worse than the windows version does through proton, but of course, no version of proton worked for me either. I tried many things, but it seems that my problem with this game is that it's just too old and nobody cares, because the few ways I found to potentially solve the problem were all themselves broken, and according to the developers of the port, this is the only game in the world that supports nvidia graphics cards but not AMD on linux. If I remember correctly, this is only the second time I've encountered an unplayable game on linux, and it's definitely for the dumbest reasons. However, I'm stubborn and was committed to getting my hands on this game so I could play it before writing about it, but since I don't have an eighth generation console and they can't be emulated effectively yet, I had to call upon the seas to deliver me once more, and... that didn't work either.
Shouldn't have bothered. Not like I was missing out on much anyway, pretty much all of the single player content is gone, there's only championship mode and multiplayer.
So, I started looking up other opinions and videos and the like about this game so I'd have something to write about, preferably from the year of its release, but very quickly realized that I don't actually care, because one small fact really stood out to me as hilarious. So before I say what it is, let's give this game the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that it's good. The handling must be good, it must look and sound good, at least as good as 2013. Whether or not that's true, be it better or worse, I don't care. It's a lot funnier if it's true though.
The 2014 season is selectable in this game. They knew what they did. Including the previous year in this game is like the video game equivalent of a kid throwing up but being too afraid to tell anyone, so they try to clean it up themselves without actually knowing how and just cover it up instead, and I think that's really funny. Less funny, however, is that for some people, even though this game has practically no content and shouldn't even be passable as a complete product, that little cover up still makes this preferable to the 2014 game. Of course it was massively buggy too, more so than any other game in the series, no surprises there.
It's almost like annually released games are a bad and stupid thing that shouldn't happen.
...and that's where I would have been happy leaving this off. However... when I tried to play the next game, it had the same error. I didn't want to skip two games, so I tried harder with troubleshooting this time, and after much pain and confusion, that led me to discover that disabling SMT in my BIOS was the solution for 2016. For fun, I reinstalled 2015 to see if it was also fixed, and it was, so I did play a couple hours of it. Turns out, my benefit of the doubt assumption was true, 2015 does look, sound, and feel very good. Being a next generation game, looking better is only natural, though I do have my nitpicks about that, and the sound being better than 2014 is not hard at all, though I do have my nitpicks about that, and it doesn't just feel better than 2014, it also feels better than 2012, 2011, and 2010, but I still prefer 2013 over this... and I still have my nitpicks of course.
I see no point in talking about my graphical nitpicks at all, for sound it's just that things are all really quiet, your own engine still gets completely drowned out by everything else, the radio is ear-splittingly uncomfortable to listen to AND forces your already quiet engine audio to get cut in half, there's an incredibly uncomfortable constant high pitched whine in every car, some much worse than others, and the overall mix feels... pinched, for lack of a better word, because of some questionable at best EQ. Maybe tense is a better word? It's like overcompression, but resulting from EQ rather than compression. Not fatiguing to listen to, not exactly uncomfortable either, but it's off-putting.
For feel, the cars behave strangely. Even with ABS turned on, the brakes still lock up and can cause some relatively unpredictable car behavior, and even with traction control on full, the rear still breaks loose quite easily. This generation of F1 cars was apparently really difficult to drive thanks to skinny tires and tons of power, and with how much sliding around happens in this game even with full assists, I get it, but I still feel like the game is a little off... because my comparison to GT cars with 2014 feels even more apt here. Not because the cars feel that heavy, that problem is solved, but in every other regard, the driving in this game feels, to me, like GT cars on fast forward. I'm sure disabling all the assists would change that feeling, but forgive me for not hating myself enough to do that on a controller for a game I have no intention of getting good at.
Nitpicks aside, there were also two particularly positive points that surprised me. First is that the new physics in this game are so much more detailed than the older games that the different cars really feel different now. They were different in previous games, but with the exception of the Force India, the differences were tiny and mostly came down to overall speed rather than unique characteristics. Here though, the cars have more personality, and that's always great to see. The other thing I was surprised by is that the AI finally has something going on! All the other drivers actually race each other now, instead of forming orderly single file trains for the whole race, completely unwilling to overtake anyone without the absolute most perfect conditions for it in the straights. They even race each other hard enough that they get penalties! Love to see it. I don't love their aggression though, because in the short two hours that I played, probably only half of which was against AI, I got spun out more than ten times and was wrecked a few times too, and I will say with full confidence that only one of those times was my fault.
If I was into F1 earlier in life and bought this game when it was new, I would have felt scammed. I don't think I had the same hatred back then for annual releases as I do now, but this would have been the game to light that fire if that happened. But playing it for the first time now with hindsight and a close, direct comparison to the rest of the series, I can still be mad about the egregious lack of content, but I can at least recognize that the underlying game is good, albeit wasted.
Too bad the game's still borderline broken and hurts my ears.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2015)
Shouldn't have bothered. Not like I was missing out on much anyway, pretty much all of the single player content is gone, there's only championship mode and multiplayer.
So, I started looking up other opinions and videos and the like about this game so I'd have something to write about, preferably from the year of its release, but very quickly realized that I don't actually care, because one small fact really stood out to me as hilarious. So before I say what it is, let's give this game the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that it's good. The handling must be good, it must look and sound good, at least as good as 2013. Whether or not that's true, be it better or worse, I don't care. It's a lot funnier if it's true though.
The 2014 season is selectable in this game. They knew what they did. Including the previous year in this game is like the video game equivalent of a kid throwing up but being too afraid to tell anyone, so they try to clean it up themselves without actually knowing how and just cover it up instead, and I think that's really funny. Less funny, however, is that for some people, even though this game has practically no content and shouldn't even be passable as a complete product, that little cover up still makes this preferable to the 2014 game. Of course it was massively buggy too, more so than any other game in the series, no surprises there.
It's almost like annually released games are a bad and stupid thing that shouldn't happen.
...and that's where I would have been happy leaving this off. However... when I tried to play the next game, it had the same error. I didn't want to skip two games, so I tried harder with troubleshooting this time, and after much pain and confusion, that led me to discover that disabling SMT in my BIOS was the solution for 2016. For fun, I reinstalled 2015 to see if it was also fixed, and it was, so I did play a couple hours of it. Turns out, my benefit of the doubt assumption was true, 2015 does look, sound, and feel very good. Being a next generation game, looking better is only natural, though I do have my nitpicks about that, and the sound being better than 2014 is not hard at all, though I do have my nitpicks about that, and it doesn't just feel better than 2014, it also feels better than 2012, 2011, and 2010, but I still prefer 2013 over this... and I still have my nitpicks of course.
I see no point in talking about my graphical nitpicks at all, for sound it's just that things are all really quiet, your own engine still gets completely drowned out by everything else, the radio is ear-splittingly uncomfortable to listen to AND forces your already quiet engine audio to get cut in half, there's an incredibly uncomfortable constant high pitched whine in every car, some much worse than others, and the overall mix feels... pinched, for lack of a better word, because of some questionable at best EQ. Maybe tense is a better word? It's like overcompression, but resulting from EQ rather than compression. Not fatiguing to listen to, not exactly uncomfortable either, but it's off-putting.
For feel, the cars behave strangely. Even with ABS turned on, the brakes still lock up and can cause some relatively unpredictable car behavior, and even with traction control on full, the rear still breaks loose quite easily. This generation of F1 cars was apparently really difficult to drive thanks to skinny tires and tons of power, and with how much sliding around happens in this game even with full assists, I get it, but I still feel like the game is a little off... because my comparison to GT cars with 2014 feels even more apt here. Not because the cars feel that heavy, that problem is solved, but in every other regard, the driving in this game feels, to me, like GT cars on fast forward. I'm sure disabling all the assists would change that feeling, but forgive me for not hating myself enough to do that on a controller for a game I have no intention of getting good at.
Nitpicks aside, there were also two particularly positive points that surprised me. First is that the new physics in this game are so much more detailed than the older games that the different cars really feel different now. They were different in previous games, but with the exception of the Force India, the differences were tiny and mostly came down to overall speed rather than unique characteristics. Here though, the cars have more personality, and that's always great to see. The other thing I was surprised by is that the AI finally has something going on! All the other drivers actually race each other now, instead of forming orderly single file trains for the whole race, completely unwilling to overtake anyone without the absolute most perfect conditions for it in the straights. They even race each other hard enough that they get penalties! Love to see it. I don't love their aggression though, because in the short two hours that I played, probably only half of which was against AI, I got spun out more than ten times and was wrecked a few times too, and I will say with full confidence that only one of those times was my fault.
If I was into F1 earlier in life and bought this game when it was new, I would have felt scammed. I don't think I had the same hatred back then for annual releases as I do now, but this would have been the game to light that fire if that happened. But playing it for the first time now with hindsight and a close, direct comparison to the rest of the series, I can still be mad about the egregious lack of content, but I can at least recognize that the underlying game is good, albeit wasted.
Too bad the game's still borderline broken and hurts my ears.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2015)