I have a casual appreciation for Formula 1. I recognize it as the world’s finest motorsport, and I’ll never stop being impressed by the combination of careful engineering and mad science that creates a competition out of ground-based aircraft. That being said, F1 Challenge for Sega Saturn was the last time I engaged the Formula 1 in videogame form, with my modern racing days being consumed by iterations of Wipeout, Burnout, and Gran Turismo. Gran Turismo’s dedication to creating a driving simulation and Wipeout’s appreciation for raw speed create some parallels, but F1 2015, on approach, appeared to be a different beast.
Even though I claim ignorance, my first steps in F1 2015 came with welcoming familiarity. The team at Codemasters (perhaps in the absence of traditional content) went out of their way to set a tone of elegance and personality to F1 2015’s artifice. A distinct focus on the actual drivers behind each racing team, a presentation that imitates the Formula 1’s broadcast presentation, and an intimate reproduction of the implied relationship between car and driver are two of its most immediate features. F1 2015 doesn’t go out of its way to inject any personality behind its real-life drivers, but it’s an impressive setup if you don’t peek behind the curtain.
If nothing else, a spotlight on drivers was a novel approach to set F1 2015 apart from its peers. Building a personality behind a racer has been laughed off the screen every time it appears in a Need for Speed game, but using actual drivers and their actual teams with their actual cars gives F1 2015 an air of authenticity. It’s comparable to any of EA or 2K’s traditional sports lineup, which generally makes implied personality a priority. If NBA 2K features the prowess of Kevin Durant or Michael Jordan, F1 2015 looks to send the same message with Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel.
When it came to actually racing, F1 2015 opened to even more of a divergent set of parameters. I was use to drawn-out career modes, cascades of cars, and boundless course configurations. In F1 2015’s season mode, you run the races from the either the 2014 or 2015 seasons as the same driver on the same team. This isn’t a bad thing! And doing practically anything else with a season mode would be illogical, but it commits the player to rigidly defined series of rules and offers little to no chance of escape. For anyone other than a fully committed Formula 1 fan, this proves troublesome.
The format of F1 2015’s seasons, as true-to-form as it may be, also served as a rude awakening. Each corner of each track is presented as the subject of intense study and tireless dedication. You’re intended to complete some practice laps and a qualifying lap before entering a proper race. Then, even after selecting a season that’s only 25% as long as a normal Formula 1 race, you’re still subjected to double digital lap assignments. Even though I was allowed to save my progress at any time, this is a significant commitment for a single race! I get that this is true to form, that stepping outside of these lines would be blasphemy to a Formula 1 fan, and that I shouldn’t complain over 1/4 of an actual race. From a casual perspective, however, F1 2015 didn’t seem to be doing enough to merit a firm commitment to an entire season of this format.
This is not to say the racing is dull or boring. There’s something to be said for F1 2015’s ability to faithfully reproduce the sensation of casually travelling in excess of one-hundred and forty miles-per-hour. Speed is relative, and, depending on the way it’s rendered, one game’s 140mph might be another’s 60mph. With that in mind, acceleration in F1 2015 is equal parts fast and furious and, as expected, speed is an empowering problem. You have so much raw power, and the challenge is finding a way to manage it all on a constricting race course.
F1 2015’s brand of racing comes with complications. You have to worry about tire compounds, fuel reserves, and dynamically shifting weather. Running a race in a thunderstorm presents a tangible different from a dry race, and F1 2015 expects the player to learn this and change their setup accordingly. In terms of the actual race, you’re docked points for clipping into other drivers or cutting corners, two behaviors that are routinely encouraged by other members of the simulation field. Again, this is expected of a Formula 1 game, but it wasn’t an ordinary part of my mental racing-game inventory. In the absence of other substantial material, F1 2015’s commitment to its craft served as a novelty.
If you’d like to push F1 2015’s commitment to precision, it offers a parallel season in the form of a Pro Season. More of a series of fixed options than an actual separate mode, Pro Season demands zero driver assists, a camera locked to the cockpit, the rewind option removed, and a fully complete season of races. One man’s treasure is another’s nightmare, although I was surprised at how little I ended up caring for driving assists. I was thrashed worse than usual during my time in Pro Mode, although I couldn’t tell if it was exclusively my fault or if my blame lied to choosing a member of the lowly Lotus team.
F1 2015’s visual presentation also bears mentioning. Racing game are typically a graphical showcase, with aspects of Driveclub and Project CARS clocking it at best-in-class status. F1 2015 is no slouch either, especially considering the painstaking attention to detail in rendering 20 different courses. Grass and other sideshows standout if you pause a replay from the right angle (handily discovered while, say, capturing screens to include in a review), but that’s to be expected. The rain, in particular, looks great even in the daytime, and visible puddles of water on the course actually started creating an measurable sensation of fear.
Beyond that there is, well, not much to speak of in F1 2015’s composition. The 2014 and 2015 seasons have a few different teams, trade a course in Germany for one in Mexico, and shuffle the track order, but they’re relatively the same to the unlearned. Multiplayer options exist to facilitate human interaction, though, despite repeated attempts, I couldn’t get a full race together a few weeks after launch. Quick race is an option that’s good for practice, but that’s pretty much where F1 2015 runs dry on content. Given what’s being accomplished in other racing space, especially without a traditional career mode, F1 2015 feels light.
Maybe this is the price of authenticity. Maybe the existing market only cares about a raw Formula 1 season. Maybe the bells and whistles of other racers aren’t F1 2015’s style. I saw it as a fun but limited endeavor in the professional side of racing, one that I appreciated at first but found monotonous after I had explored every course. I know there are differences in the teams, I know there’s depth behind the wealth of customization options, and I know the game spends a lot of time looking gorgeous. After that initial thrill, however, I just didn’t care.
Even though we’re nearly two years into the console cycle— and even though F1 2014 was even lighter on content—F1 2015 still feels like a surface level, launch-ready offering. It’s good for what it is, but to all but the hardest of the Formula 1 core, that’s not much.
