How to ruin a great idea.
* Good sense of speed
* All the right cars and liveries
Minus:
* Poor steering
* Poor acceleration/braking
* Dated visuals
* Pit to car radio gives useless info
* The engine sounds have a mind of their own
I've given this game SO many chances. I really want it to work for me, i want it to be good but it's just not got what it takes.
I am genuinely disappointed with this game, not least because it's a game about Formula 1. But also because it's a game that has 4 full seasons (1999 to 2002) of F1 with the correct cars, liveries, tracks and drivers for each of those seasons.
It should be my wet-dream of a game.
Should be, but it's not even close in reality.
You see with a driving or racing game, the first thing that needs to be right is how the game conveys the experience of driving the machinery it offers. And this is where "F1 Career Challenge" trips up. The very first hurdle.
The driving model is awful. It's not fun, it's not something to be learned, it's not consistent, it's just bad.
It's not car-dependant, it's not year-dependant, it's all across the board. The best i can describe it is this:
It's like the developers have taken a digital system and assigned it to the analogue sticks but haven't included a range of where to start the movement and how quickly it should progress when the deflection of the stick increases.
Consequently the dead-zone is huge, then when you push the stick far enough you get all the steering in one glob. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, TOO MUCH.
The braking and acceleration is the same: Not enough, not enough, not enough, spin.
Put them together and you get a driving game which lacks any amount of cohesion and fluidity through the controls, it forces you to dissect a corner into chunks of brakes, steering and acceleration rather than through one seamless action.
How can anyone program a game for a console and then not make it work through a gamepad?
I'm angry about this game. It had so much potential from its licence and the developers ruined it, i'm sure no racing game (or F1) fans were consulted at any stage of production. If they were then they were quite blatantly ignored, it's absolutely no wonder that EA lost the rights to publish F1 games after this.
Yes there are other small good things about the game as well as a few other things Visual Sciences got wrong, but there's absolutely no point me telling you or you wishing to find out.
I implore you if you're a fan of F1 or driving games to stay away from this one.