I spent a great deal of time this year dragging myself out of bed in the early morning hours to watch another tumultuous Formula 1 season, and this one was as crazy as ever. One Gran Prix was cancelled, another one was added, and both constructor and driver championships were decided well before the season ended. My respect for the drivers and their amazing talent is endless, but as you might expect, I often wonder how things would be if I was out there on the grid. Luckily, until McLaren starts calling, I have Codemasters’ F1 2011 to get me by.
Codemasters has a good track record with racing games, making marks in the industry with GRiD and the DiRT racing series, then bringing Formula 1 cars to your fingertips with last year’s F1 2010. This year’s entry builds mostly from the previous game, but adds a great deal of tiny improvements to outshine the former.
You again start out your F1 career as a rookie driver being given the opportunity to start with one of the lower tiered teams. The player will spend a little time out of the driver’s seat in their trailer office, where standings can be viewed, helmets can be customized, and emails can be read to give you a sense of what your public image is. You’ll also occasionally be nabbed by the media for some questions so you can practice delivering cookie-cutter non-answers to the press about your team’s performance. With this much immersion into the race driver lifestyle, I’m surprised they don’t make you thank sponsors at the end of races.
Of course, the heart of the game is in the cockpit of an F1 car. With multiple camera views available, you can attempt to negotiate a track in full “Massa-Vision” to see all the cockpit details, but given the level of difficulty, you may opt for a different one. This game is a slow burn, so don’t expect to see the podium any time soon. As mentioned before, the teams and car available to you at the beginning of the career mode is one of three lower tiered teams. Goals for practice, qualifying, and the race will be given to you by your race engineer. Meeting and exceeding those goals put you in good standing with the team, as well as earning design improvements to the car. You’ll also gain RPG-like points in this fashion, allowing you to “level-up” to a more prominent Formula One constructor.
Like the previous game, the tracks of the season are very accurately represented, with even more details thrown in the mix, with every bend, elevation, and regional weather recreated to a spectacular degree. It seems as though Codemasters acknowledge the fact that this is a very niche game and have taken extra steps to put in tons of minor details for the fans of this sport; fans who love scrutinizing tiny details. For example, while there are no safety car deployments in the game if a major wreck happens, the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG is seen sitting at the end of the pit lane ready to go. It’s not a big deal, but fans will notice its presence just as much as its absence was noted in the previous game. Other details like changing the display graphics to make them match the ones on broadcasts as much as possible is also noted.
The game play itself can be incredibly hard, depending on what difficulty settings you input, such as brake assist, A.I. aggression, and traction control. More often than not, you’ll end up spinning out as you learn the grip limits of your tires and which down force settings work best in the current track. The steep difficulty curve can make you feel pretty lousy when combined with the fact that you’re not in a top car from the beginning, and it takes a bit of reprogramming on the player’s part to accept that doing well at this stage isn’t placing in the top 3 spots like in more prominent race game titles. Despite all that, if you are behind Chandok, just as in real life, you aren’t doing that well. Races and race seasons can be trimmed to a minimal amount of laps and do-overs, but can be cranked up to real-time 2 hour affairs if you want to go hardcore, which is likely for the target players.
The visuals have taken a great hike up in this game, and every surface feels like it has a tangible texture, especially when it comes to track surfaces. Elements of the cars can be seen flexing as they round the track due to all the aero and g-force stresses the real cars go through. If you when you end up going off track, you’ll see gravel and grass debris accumulate on the tires, or both, depending on the situation.
F1 2011 really goes a step further with the driver experience this time around. Rain, like last time, will add a wet-visor visual effect to the screen, depending on your view choice. You’ll also have the sounds and clicks of machinery around you, adding to the atmosphere, such as when the DRS flap drops. Lining up your car behind another racer, and the camera violently jostles to tell you that you’re in his turbulent air stream.
While KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) was present in last year’s Formula One season, it didn’t make it into the game. This year, both KERS and the brand new DRS system is there for you to manage just as the drivers are required to. Realities like tire punctures and wing damage effect your game play, as well as some of the more stringent driving rules if you are playing the game as close to a simulation as possible. Passing during a caution or not letting faster cars by will result in stern action from the virtual stewards, and sometimes its hard to judge just what exactly you should be doing to appease them. The blue flag rule, which requires drivers to allow cars who have lapped them to pass, can be extremely frustrating in the early game stages, and I ended up black flagged from one race despite my compliance. Maybe the game expected me to pull over and stop racing at this point, I’m not sure. I then wished the simulated press interviews allowed you to lambast the FIA.
You can always forego the simulated driver life of the career mode and choose the Gran Prix mode, which allows you to and jump into any car or track from the get-go, without having to unlock it them in single player. It essentially works like the “arcade” option in Gran Turismo for quick pick-up-and-go sessions. Then of course is the multiplayer, which allows you to race online against other F1 fanatics across the world, including one major addition.
The multiplayer of F1 2011 now features a co-op mode where two players, either via split screen or online, can team up and race as the 1 and 2 drivers of a constructor. This is a fantastic addition to the game as replacing you A.I. driven team member with a real-life human changes the dynamics of game play in unpredictable ways. Will you both do what’s best for the team? Will one of you look to improve your standings? Will you fight to be the #1 driver and get all the upgrades first?
F1 2011 is a fun sim of Formula One life and about as close as many of us will get to the real deal. It’s a detail oriented game for detail oriented fans of a detail oriented sport, so casual gamers need not apply. Fans of the sport, however, will find loads to lose themselves in, be it perfecting their driving styles, finding the best down force settings, and picking the best strategies for the races ahead. The game is out now and retails $59.99. Check out www.formula1-game.com for more info.
Note: F1 2011 is available on Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC. We tested the PS3 version of a review copy sent to us by the developers.
Words By – Alex Kalogiannis
