I Become a Racing Driver (F1 2020)

Game: F1 2020
Available On: Xbox One, PS4, Windows, Google Stadia
Played On: Xbox One
Price: £44.99
Available on Xbox Game Pass or PS Now: No

Sim Racing. Maybe this wasn’t even something you knew existed before lockdown, but if you enjoy formula one even as the most casual fan, you’ll be well aware of the phenomena it became. With the real drivers unable to race, a virtual series involving them became one of the big hits of no sport period of us all being stuck indoors. This led to the timely release in July of F1 2020, developed and developed by Codemasters.

Much like FIFA, Madden or a 2k game, F1 is normally a yearly release and coming to the end of last decade, these games were going from strength to strength and improving quite rapidly year on year, and after last years massive reworking on the AI, this year saw the ambitious addition of a my team, where you become a teams owner/driver and build your own formula one team from the ground up as well as having all the other game modes available from last year. Sadly we haven’t manage to stick to the original F1 calendar this year but this game of course contains all the tracks and all in order as if we didn’t have a worldwide pandemic.

So let’s get stuck in with this new game mode. It has the usual start, your name, nationality, your helmet design, setting up a name for your team and how your car looks (I’ll get a bit more into this later) and your team colours. You then get to choose your engine supplier, (Renault, Honda, Ferrari, Mercedes), your teams title sponsor, and most importantly your teammate, it appears you have a random selection of F2 drivers to choose from.

Moving on you have all your facilities and ways to improve your car, this can be done with cold hard cash that you build up over time, or resource points, points given out for completing practice programs during a race weekend. But invest these wisely as improve the wrong thing and you can in fact make your car worse so it’s worth doing a tiny bit of research if you’re brand new to the game. It very much is a learn by doing game so don’t worry if you’re brand new to the formula one games, but if you’ve played them before You’ll be fine picking up the new aspect of the game.

But how does it handle? Well this questions a bit more literal as the game has a brand new handling model for this year and I have to say, it’s fantastic, you can really feel the cars movement through the corners so being precise is so important. And any understeer or oversteer is really punishing so you can really get to tweaking your set up to make it as crisp as possible, and when you get it right, my word does it feel satisfying. The AI are cleaner as well, they stay quite aggressive but are a lot cleaner and a lot more textural in the way they will overtake you or stay in front. All round this makes the game a challenge but a very enjoyable one.

The sliding scale of difficulty is another plus, if you’re a beginner to being a seasoned veteran, you’ll find the right challenge for you, especially as the difficult can be adjusted by one or two clicks to get it just right. On top of this you can have a pretty much personalised set if assists to run, so no matter your skill level you’ll find the right difficulty for you. It even has a ‘casual mode’ difficulty which gives the game a more arcade style feel, but I’d avoid this if you’re more of a serious sim driver.

The only downside is the ‘podium pass’ and this is how you unlock different helmets and liveries for your car. This unlocks with levelling up and you gain xp from doing races or certain challenges. It has a fortnite style feel with a free section but you can spend in game currency to unlock the VIP section, the only way to get in game currency is with getting it as an unlock when you reach a level if you’re lucky, or you guessed it, you buy it. Of course they try to entice you in with extra unlocks visually for your car or character but it won’t improve performance. It is a slight let down at the beginning as you’re customisation options are limited and it feels a bit of a let down but that’s just for me.

The graphics are very good and I will let them off for the fact that the Mercedes and Mclaren don’t look like they do in real life but in their defence these cars changed their looks one week before the game was released. We may get new tracks as just today 3 tracks that weren’t planned for this year have been added to the real F1 calendar so maybe we’ll be getting quite a bumper year for us virtual drivers.

This game is easily the best version of F1 I have played, it’s crisp, clean and handles so well. It’s fun and will be fun for anyone who has any interest in racing or racing games, I would highly recommend picking this years title up. It is a shame with the slight money grabbing podium pass, but as this is just for emotes and visuals I can’t really complain. This game is good, very very good and deserves all the praise it’s getting. This is the new standard of F1 games and it easily takes the top step of the podium.

9/10

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