F1 2018

Over the past few years, Codemasters has quietly shaped its F1 franchise into one of the most superb sports series on the market. Today’s F1 games fuse a deep and rewarding racing experience with the same kind of supplemental reverence to a real-life sport that you get from the likes of FIFA, NBA 2K, or any other licensed bat-or-ball sweatfest. F1 2018 is easily the studio’s best effort yet, despite its increasingly stale look.

 

Aside from seeing Liberty Media’s divisive new F1 logo wedged into as many places as possible (and all the titanium thongs bolted to the current season’s cars) you could definitely be forgiven for not spotting a huge number of immediate differences between F1 2018 and F1 2017. With no real changes to the UI it feels like slipping into yesterday’s pants: familiarity and ease at the cost of freshness.

The recycled look doesn’t harm the on-track experience, but it would have been nice to see some meaningful tweaks to the presentation to coincide with the motorsport’s first rebrand since 1987. Some reused menus and rehashed commentary are one thing, but the fact we’ve been seeing the same garage interstitials and podium celebrations for four years now (since F1 2015!) is a bit rich. I think the celebratory hugs in the garage after securing a World Championship are new, but after that all you get is a picture of a trophy and it’s back to work. It’s baffling to me how quickly F1 2018 rushes through the act of attaining the ultimate goal of Formula 1.

These people-powered sequences do look better than they ever have previously, though. F1 2018’s humans remain a rung below the cars and circuits in terms of fidelity but they’re an instantly noticeable improvement on F1 2017, with far more realistic skin, hair, and facial animation.

Visual enhancements elsewhere aren’t quite as obvious – certainly at the speeds F1 cars tend to thread through these circuits – but they’re there nonetheless. There’s more granular trackside detail than ever before with pumped-up tree foliage, plus surfaces that better display their years of high speed abuse thanks to improvements to the lighting system. The spectrum of authentic lighting conditions in F1 2018 is great, from bright, blue days to low sun burning through the haze. Even gloomy, overcast conditions look fantastic as the sun struggles to beat through gaps in the grey clouds above. F1 2018 is an excellent-looking racing game, make no mistake.

The juicier changes in F1 2018 are its massaged career mode and AI improvements. The 10-season career mode plays out in a very similar fashion to the those in F1 2016 and F1 2017, but there are more layers to it now. There’s a new contract system to wrestle with, team morale to consider (and manipulate), and also the threat of all your research and development gains being dashed by regulation changes from season to season.

Throughout each season in F1 2018 your driver’s contract can be renegotiated and, depending on how well you’ve been meeting team goals and your overall value to the organisation, you may be able to propose extra perks. These include things like marginally faster pit stops, or speedier parts development, but whether or not your team will accept your terms is a mini puzzle game unto itself (you only have three attempts to push a contract through before you’re forced to accept your team’s original, lower deal). It’s a decent little flourish to inject into career mode to help illustrate your driver’s value and deliver handy bonuses to us for our careers.

The performance parts R&D tree system is akin to the one in F1 2017 but the points you need to launch part development are awarded a little more liberally than they’ve been in the past – even if you skip the practice sessions.  This is good because my interest in running the same practice programs on the same tracks as I did in F1 2016 and F1 2017 is wearing dangerously thin, but I still wanted to engage in the R&D system.

Morale in each of the R&D departments can be impacted positively or negatively by your responses in post-session interviews, which play out like more informal versions of the press conferences that long-term fans may recall from F1 2010. They’re a cute touch but the questions get pretty repetitive by the end of a 21-race season. The gameplay benefit of them is you can give your power unit team a lift by praising them on camera, or get your durability team buzzed by boasting about how much on-track torture the car can absorb. Increased morale means a slightly reduced chance of development failures, which are always a random risk when engineering new parts.

You can also dunk on elements of the car you’re not happy with by blaming your poor performances on things like deficient aero or a shonky chassis, but shaming your team on global TV seems counterproductive if you want things to improve and your car to get faster. I don’t know why anyone would bother selecting any of the obviously destructive answers. I like the idea of these first-person, RPG-style back-and-forths and their capacity to sell the race driver fantasy, but I generally felt like I was mainly just gaming the responses to buoy my engine team to lessen the chance of them botching the parts I keep asking for. It’s ultimately a little one-dimensional.

The spectre of incoming regulation changes towards the back end of the season is a better addition and adds an interesting wrinkle to F1 2018’s R&D arms race. Overall car development progress is much faster in F1 2018 than F1 2017 but regulation changes have the potential to wipe out entire segments of your team’s tech tree unless you spend points on adapting existing upgrades to keep them legal for the following year. The question becomes: do you pivot and exhaust your resources protecting your current gains or go for broke and try and outpace your rivals to snare the current championship, rolling the dice on where the regulation shake-up will leave your team on the grid next season? This big-picture strategy stuff is a great

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