Formula One fans should be pleased that F1 2019 is arriving with 13 of this season’s races yet to happen; back in the day, F1 games customarily arrived at or towards the end of a given season. And a decade since Warwickshire-based developer Codemasters started making video games based on the pinnacle of motorsports, it’s fair to say that the studio has cracked it. As with all annual sports games – such as EA Sports’ Fifa – each new iteration will only ever bring incremental improvements, but there are some welcome new elements in F1 2019, and the sheer quality of its execution is more evident than ever.
But the biggest addition is Formula One’s feeder series, F2. You can play all the way through F2’s 2018 season – competing against Lando Norris, Alexander Albon and George Russell, who all entered Formula One this year. Its presence adds a clever intro, with a modicum of narrative thrust, to the headline Career mode: to earn your seat in Formula One, you must complete a truncated version of F2’s 2018 season, competing for the title with two other (fictional) drivers, a surprisingly entertaining rivalry that plays out on track and in cutscenes.
Once you make it to the big time, you find what is unquestionably the best-looking Formula One game ever – Codemasters has, for instance, nailed the visual atmosphere of night races held under lights. More importantly, the cars feel incredibly convincing: extraordinarily grippy, but prone to tyre degradation, which means you must exercise care with braking distances and flooring the throttle on exit in the later stages of races. Mess up your approach to one of the higher kerbs and you will be pitched into a spin, although you can still rewind past egregious mistakes.
For motorsports aficionados, it’s the comprehensive detail that impresses. F1 2019 adds the annual end-of-season merry-go-round of drivers moving between teams; the ability to shape the development of your car over each season (as seen in F1 2018) is back, rewarding you again for diligently completing your team’s testing programmes; mid-season invitational events have returned; and you can design your own race series or jump into a cornucopia of classic F1 cars. One paid-for downloadable event lets you play out the famous rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. New multiplayer leagues welcome those of us who don’t possess preternatural driving skills, and you can keep tabs on the recently inaugurated F1 eSports series that plays out alongside the real thing.
As befits the official Formula One game, F1 2019 is certainly up there with the very best serious motorsport games. You won’t find one that looks better or provides more convincing car-handling, and yet its optional driver aids mean you don’t need to be as skilled as a real F1 driver to feel like the next Lewis Hamilton.
