While I certainly love the concept of the more recent Codemasters F1 release, as it dives into the complicated depths of the sport, there’s something joyous about simplicity in racing games. When I speak of simplicity in racing games, I am pointing to old arcade experiences like Monaco GP, Pole Position, and/or Super Sprint. All bring some F1 love to their gameplay experience without the complication that comes with racing games nowadays.
Well, those simple racing days have returned with 4PGP from developer 3goo. It’s a racing game that puts more emphasis on the player’s control and decision-making skills, rather than any sort of mathematics and precision that are expected in an F1 game these days. Is that bad? Not necessarily because sometimes players just want a racing game that won’t qualify them as a team mechanic in the real world. 4PGP was built for fun and just to keep the experience simple, and in those respects, it achieves its goals.
Let’s dive right into this racing game on the Nintendo Switch 2.
Easy but hard
The main points of emphasis in 4PGP’s gameplay structure are easy controls and crazy-good competition. Let’s start with the former.
The controls for 4PGP make the experience positively thoughtless. This means players won’t need to think about wings on the car, what tires to use, engine maintenance, or anything that you might find in a more recent F1 gaming experience. Ultimately, the gameplay mechanics come down to two things – controls and tracks.
With the controls, it’s nothing but simplicity. Players press A to accelerate and B to brake. Moving the car around curves is comfortable and gives enough leeway for mistakes. This is comparable to old F1 arcade experiences from the 80s and 90s, where just having your player worry about a race rather than the finer details makes for an easy and fun time. For example, in the classic game Pole Position, the player is only dealing with steering, acceleration, and shifting a car into high and low. Beyond that, the player only needs to worry about slowing down during difficult turns. Nothing crazy, and it makes everyone playing the game feel like an expert racer.
4PGP takes that same simple control concept and delivers an easy-to-pick-up game in the process. Moving the F1 car in the game, braking and accelerating, all of it is easy. There wasn’t a moment beyond the first 10 seconds of the game when I felt overwhelmed or confused about the controls. 4PGP made sure my concentration was firmly placed on the racing experience. This meant that I could appreciate the various tracks included in the game, find twists and turns before they happened, and focus on traversing the competition when it called for it. Nothing too complicated and no tough surprises. Just easy-peasy F1 gaming.
Now, of course, just because the controls were easy to figure out didn’t mean that the competition was going to be easy. Because, oh my God, the CPU characters are competitive.
Competitive CPU
The devs at 3goo seem to be gaslighting its gamers. Racing isn’t complicated, which makes the game seem like a walk in the park, but it’s not. Players will find out quickly that the CPU players are not joking around. The CPU-controlled competition in 4PGP is methodical and malicious, more than I have seen with an arcade-racing type of game these days. They will exploit weaknesses and take advantage of situations. It can be mean and maddening – and this is just on the normal difficulty of the game.
If players decide to go normal or up the difficulty beyond that, then they should expect cars not be polite when bumping them off the track, or even kicking their own cars into high gear when players stumble just a bit. For the first three games of this on normal, I made the mistake of not taking a curve correctly, and instantly, I was left behind. It became so tough that even at the rookie difficulty level, I found fifth place to be a huge win for me. Yeah, it’s that difficult, and I grew up loving F1 games since the 80s. It’s not like this was my first one.
Now, for any players looking for an easy-going arcade racer, this might catch them off guard. Maybe some of the players will take on the challenge, maybe some won’t. Regardless, the ramped-up difficulty and the unforgiving CPU players help balance out the game’s easy-going controls and equal out to a better-than-expected time. It’s certainly not a perfect balance, but it’s as close as an arcade-racer experience is going to get. In other words, it’s going to be tough, so players should expect a challenge. It won’t be impossible, though.
Playing it together
Should a player get so frustrated with the game that they just want to bring their friends into the fray and play them, then that option is available. The game allows for local players to go at it via GameShare or go head-to-head online via GameChat. These options help bring down any potential frustration the single-player experience might bring, which is always a good thing.
Outside of online and local play, there are unlockables during the game that will motivate players to keep trying. They come in the form of tracks and cars, and while the tracks are probably the more valuable of the two categories, it’s still nice to have a dangled carrot to encourage players to keep playing this game regardless of difficulty and frustration.
There are also varying game modes to help change things up. These include a championship mode (season-ish), quick play (just as it states), and time trials (that is an old school game mode). Again, nothing too complicated or overwhelming, and just enough ‘different’ to bring some minor motivation to keep playing.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
4PGP from developer 3goo is a fun arcade racing experience that offers good challenges, while not muddying the racing waters too much with magnified details. Its gameplay harkens back to games like Monaco GP and Pole Position without pushing itself into a complicated F1 sim.
