I've never had an F1 game before and after going to Silverstone for the British GP, I felt compelled to break the duck and try the game.
I'm no stranger to racing games, mainly the Forza series and back in my PS2 days the likes of Need for Speed.
However after my new found love for Formula 1 I though I would splash out the cash on a brand new game and see what it's like.
The first thing I notice is that this game doesn't like you to play on a regular controller. I haven't bought a game wheel yet, but if I play the game more and more I may feel obliged to spend even more money.
After a few goes on time trial to get used to the game and some of the tracks I thought I would venture out on a Championship season.
You are forced to pick a driver in this year's game, I knew that you could make your own driver in previous games, so I went with veteran Ferrari driver Kimi Raikkonen.
The Championship season on the game is probably the most basic and shallow thing they could have imagined - or didn't imagine. You can choose three lengths of campaign, 25%, 50% or 100% race weekends. You can't mix up the days so you have a long qualifying session and short race, which I wanted to do due to a 100% race being very long. So I was stuck with a short practice, a single qualifying round (against a ghost) and a short race.
The more you go into the season, the more you realise how the game is literally just back-to-back races. No stats, no ability to look back at previous results and the worst thing is once you have done all 19 races - that is it.
So don't bother trying to get a Manor Marussia car into the points or Williams close to winning the Contructor's Championship - there's no point. You have no ability to build on your success, you simply start again with a new driver.
You have the use of voice commands in this years game. Hold LB and speak to your engineer who you must say one of the commands to that show on the screen. If your playing at night and don't want to wake people up, it's pretty useless as it's impossible to use the D-Pad to select things at the bottom of the menu as it mysteriously closes down as you go to select your option.
All this would be ok if you could ever hear you race engineer. I've messed with the settings and I can't get a good mix of audio levels. I have had to turn subtitles on and sometimes have to read them whilst racing as the voice of your engineer is so quiet. The only alternative to this is turn of the noise of you car - but who would want to do that?
The races are filled with bugs; from cars turning into shadows, Mercedes constantly pitting both their cars at the same time, getting stuck in 2nd gear exiting the pit lane and so on. Don't get me started with the online bugs.
The PlayStation version has been patched since and has a new interface in the race which shows tyre temperature but for some reason the Xbox version is still waiting for this upgrade.
On the positive side, the game looks and feels beautiful. The 19 race tracks are spot on and the surrounding areas are enough to distract you from the race to admire how well of a job they did. When it rains, and I mean really rains, you get the great sense of what it must feel to be driving at the time as it obscures your view and you get clouded in the spray of the car in front.
The game is fully licensed so all drivers faces are put into the game (despite them looking horrific), it's nice to see the adverts everywhere as it adds a really authentic feel to the races.
On the whole, Codemasters seem to have taken more away from the game than what they gave it. I'm a little disappointed and I don't see people playing this game for very long unless they release new patches to update and upgrade the game, otherwise you will be buying a game that, unless you love it, will only be playing it for 2-4 weeks maximum.
2.5