First of all, I'll cop to the fact that I'm smarter than the average arcade racer. I've been simracing for the last three years, so I like cars that are both fun and a challenge to drive. F1 2010 did not fit that bill. Don't get me wrong, there are some very innovative features in F1 2010. I think the career mode mechanic itself is fantastic, the press conferences and near total immersion could make up for some shoddy game mechanics if that's all that there was. But that's not all that's wrong with this game:
1. Faked AI times in qualifying: Seriously? You really couldn't get this right Codemasters? The cars may circulate around the track but the times they post aren't actually the times it took the cars to go around that track. Why have them actually run at all? Why not have them just sit in the garage instead of come out and block me when there is no time for them to get around and start a lap. Then you expect me to believe that race lap times are not faked? Well how can that be any easier than timing qualifying? Here you have all of the cars on track and being timed at once.
2. Cartoony graphics: Yes, let's follow the trend of over saturation of colors in every game so we can have them as rich as possible. I don't want them as rich as possible. I want them as real as possible. Instead of putting in the maximum settings allowed by your engine (which was done by user created content), you made the most prestigious racing series in the world a cartoon.
3. Arcadey handling: Thank you for misleading us Anthony Davidson... you said you wanted the game to be both realistic and fun. It may be fun but it cannot possibly be realistic. If it were realistic, anyone could be an F1 driver. The cars always have some level of traction control on, no matter the level which is selected in the aids screen. The car feels like it's on rails... until you hit some magical limit on grip where it is impossible to save the car. Yes, I'm sure that's very realistic.
4. Horrible AI: My first season I started with Virgin Racing, one of the F1 new boys and the second/third slowest car on the grid. My teammate qualified 24th. I qualified 16th on the highest difficulty level. the AI got even worse in the race. I finished 4th. That constitutes a joke. The AI can take low speed corners pretty well. Medium speed, not very well, and I can go through high speed corners two gears higher. I won my first race at Barcelona... statistically my worst track.
5. What pit strategy? How is it that I can be fifteen seconds ahead of Heikki Kovalinen (in his Lotus) and he wins the race, when I make no mistakes and have a perfect pit stop. I'll tell you how... he doesn't pit. The biggest rule change for this year was no added fuel during the race, but you must change tyres. How do you not make sure the biggest rule change of the year happens to every car. Add to that, I can come in first, but because the AI cars can act like they're on rails, I lose out on the pit stops. Then, my team's stops are so piss poor, that I have to wait for every single car to pass me and leave in 24th. And oh by the way, the AI cars are ghosts in the pits. You can't hit them. If i can't hit them then why do I have to wait.
6. The completely messed up penalty system: No matter who the aggressor is, I will almost always get a penalty in the race. I slow down for a corner and get hit from behind, I get a penalty for causing a collision. Hell I got a penalty coming into the pits for blocking. Really? How does that work? The penalty system is pretty much completely broken. It's nice to know they tried, but it's sad to know they couldn't even get that right.
7. Wet weather driving: Okay, I race rFactor, a game with no rain, but I've done enough real life wet weather driving to know that the cars do not have more grip in the rain. Yet Codemasters seems to be under that impression. I can go from option (soft) tyres in a dry weather setup to full wets in a soaked track and have MORE grip. How does that happen? It doesn't, I mean, I enjoy the wet weather driving, mainly because the cars seems to have the level of trickiness they should have in the dry, but still, the first race I did after a wet qualifying, the car had less grip than in the wet.
8. Downshifting delay: one of my favorite sounds is hearing an F1 car downshift. You know it, the quick sound that you swear could be be a gun as it goes by. I have to take corners so much slower than I would in an rFactor mod such as F1RFT because there is a delay in shifting gears. Apparently people had trouble with losing grip and downshifting. Instead of adding yet another aide, they just made it so everyone had to deal with the same thing. On some corners I need double the space to slow down as I would in other F1 games/mods. It's... so ridiculous I can't find a word/phrase to adequately describe it's ridiculousness.
9: Multiplayer timing: I've seen cars 8 seconds faster on a lap and they don't know how it happened. It's like the timing gave that car a flux capacitor for a lap and it was able to somehow get quicker, without the driver doing anything. My personal favorite was when I won at a race at the Hungaroring and was put in second. WTF?
Okay... that's really all I have time for, and all that bearing in mind, I'm an F1 whore. I will buy next years game because it's an F1 game, no matter how much it sucks.
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