F1 2014 Review - Same car, different tyres

You should be used to seeing another F1 game hitting store shelves in October. Since its first release in 2011, Codemasters has been releasing one of these every year without fault. F1 2011 was the first good Formula 1 game in a long time, F1 2012 improved on that formula (pun not intended) and added a lot of fan-requested features but F1 2013 broke the spell by feeling too much like a re-skin of last year’s product. Is F1 2014 doomed for the same fate, or was 2013 just a bad year for Codemasters?

 

F1 2014 offers all of this season’s 19 tracks, along with this season’s roster of pilots and their respective cars. The driving still strikes that good balance between simulation and arcade at the default difficulties but can always be customized to suit your preferences. Everything ranging from AI difficulty to driving assists and realism of the damage can be changed and tweaked to fit your desires and play the way you want to. If you ever get bored of the usual practice-qualifying-racing routine, you can always hit up the challenges which provide you with specific situations inspired from real-life events that you’ll need to overcome.

Previous F1 games begun with the Young Driver’s Test, a clever way to handle a tutorial as, in real life, young drivers aren’t used to driving F1 cars and therefore need some time to get used to them. It starts off by asking you to do very simple things and slowly progressed by tasking you with bigger and bigger challenges. It was a tad bit too long and could get tricky at times, but it was an excellent way to test your skills, understand your strong and weak points, and get you used to the different conditions you’ll face. F1 2014 scraps all that and begins by having you do an “Evaluation Test”, which I put in quotation marks for a reason: it isn’t really a test and there isn’t much evaluation going on. Basically, you pick a team, race ONE lap of a track and then the game suggests a difficulty. Now, I’ve played all the Formula 1 games and a decent amount of racing games, I’m by no means amazing at this genre, but I can hold my own. Formula 1 suggested I play on the easiest setting.

I don’t blame the game for suggesting that, I had only done ONE lap and it wasn’t very good, especially since I haven’t played an F1 game in nearly a year. Obviously I knew I wasn’t that bad at the game and I thought the next challenge would put me closer to the right difficulty. There is no next challenge. That was the tutorial. ONE lap.

 

I ended up redoing the tutorial and, already, I managed to shave off a few seconds from my time and earn a Medium difficulty suggestion. At this point I didn’t really care about the difficulty, the game allows you to change it any time, even mid-season, so I could always update it if I felt it was wrong. Regardless, this is no way to handle a tutorial. The previous games did an excellent job at introducing all the aspects of the game whereas F1 2014 throws that all out the window and instead gives you a short, hlaf-assed “tutorial” which barely touches on anything and is also very inaccurate when it comes to suggesting your difficulty. Any racing game player knows that one lap is no where near enough to get someone used to the game, let alone judging their skills from it.

Once I was able to start my career, I was greeted by the same bare-bones UI from the previous games. I was never a fan of it; it does the job, but it feels clunky and unintuitive, not to mention that as soon as you press the A button you get immediately thrown into your car and on track. My first instinct was to press A to open an e-mail message from my team principal and, instead, I found myself in my car doing practice laps for the Australian Grand Prix. Not that the e-mails have anything interesting or important to say  - they just give you information you either already know or are reminded of throughout the race weekend.

 

The career mode of F1 2014 remains pretty much untouched; you go from one track to another where you have a one hour long practice session, a qualifying session and a race. Nothing in between the sessions, nothing in between the events. Occasionally, you have to do a specific challenge for R&D purposes, for example, do 3 laps without going below 85% tyre wear and earn a -10% bonus to tyre wear in the future.If you played an F1 game before, you know what to expect from the career mode as it has been left untouched.

In fact, the whole game feels untouched compared to the previous games. Sure, the roster has been updated and the teams have been buffed or nerfed to match this season’s performance but, with the exception of the new Sochi track, this game might as well be called F1 2013. The game’s engine is the same, and it’s starting to show: car models look okay but, everything else is very unimpressive. The tracks are bland, the mechanics barely look and act like humans and the environmental effects - such as rain or picking up dirt from outside the track - seem basic. Even non-visual stuff is the same; the AI still behaves strangely, the engineer talking to you on the radio is the same in every team, not to mention the same voice you’ve heard for the past four years and even his lines are repetitive and get old very quickly.

The AI isn’t very aggressive when it comes to overtaking you and even less so when it comes to overtaking each other. It seems like that if it wasn’t for you, every driver would be perfectly happy with the position they qualified with. In addition to this, there is still the same problem that was present in the past years: the AI still brakes way too early for corners. The only way to improve that is by increasing the difficulty, which doesn’t get rid of the problem completely and makes the game a lot harder because everyone is lapping considerably faster. By the fourth installment, I would have expected bigger improvements, especially to the game mode that you’ll be spending the most time with.

F1 2014 is by no means a bad game. The driving still feels good and it is still a faithful representation of the sport, it just feels like a lazy re-skin of the previous edition. If you still own F1 2013 or, hell, even F1 2012, there isn’t much reason to upgrade to this year’s edition unless you REALLY want to race on Sochi or it bothers you seeing Felipe Massa still racing for Ferrari. I am sure that Codemasters is hard at work on the next gen evolution of the F1 franchise, but, as a result, F1 2014 isn’t an easy recommendation, save perhaps for the most hardcore fans.