First Impressions Are In For Codemasters’ F1 2019 Video Game. What about Formula 1? As you can imagine, the action this year is going to be even more realistic than in F1 2018. The graphics.
. Summary: The official videogame of the 2019 FIA Formula One World Championship, F1 2019 challenges you to Defeat your Rivals in the most ambitious F1 game in Codemasters' history. The game is released a full two months earlier during the Formula 1 myWorld Grosser Preis von Osterreich 2019 weekend The official videogame of the 2019 FIA Formula One World Championship, F1 2019 challenges you to Defeat your Rivals in the most ambitious F1 game in Codemasters' history. The game is released a full two months earlier during the Formula 1 myWorld Grosser Preis von Osterreich 2019 weekend and, unlike previous iterations, ahead of the British, German and Hungarian races. F1 2019 features all the official teams, drivers and all 21 circuits from the 2019 season. This year sees the inclusion of F2 with players being able to complete the 2018 season with the likes of George Russell, Lando Norris and Alexander Albon. The 2019 F2 season content will be made available as a free digital update during the season.
Having established itself as one of the highest rated racing franchises of all time, F1 2019 builds on the success of previous iterations and delivers an experience that rivals the quality and production values of its real-life race counterpart. With greater emphasis on graphical fidelity, the environments have been significantly enhanced, and the tracks come to life like never before.
Night races have been completely overhauled creating vastly improved levels of realism and the upgraded F1 broadcast sound and visuals add further realism to all aspects of the race weekend. Graphics - a huge step up from 2018 Servers - finally a real servers are being used, rather than peer-to-peer connection F2 cars - a nice Graphics - a huge step up from 2018 Servers - finally a real servers are being used, rather than peer-to-peer connection F2 cars - a nice touch. And that's it.
This game is literally a reskinned F1 2018 with F2 cars, servers and better graphics. There is nothing new content wise, NOTHING. They promised how LEAGUES would be huge. In reality, leagues are an unranked online championchips, but they're called leagues and have their own collumn in menu. Another HUGE feature F2 cars and story in career.
F2 cars are nice but honestly. Who is going to play F2 cars more than 3x till 2020 comes out? And the story. Its 1 hour long F2 scripted prequell to a normal F1 career (your choices and results don't even have consequences later on). And the last and biggest talking point of all.
SENNA V PROST RIVARLY EDITION!!!! You'll get 8 invitational events and 2 classic cars to play with. Let that sink in. Ofc you'll get liveries and custom designes for you suit, gloves and helmet, but is that enough for additional 10€?
I don't think so. Now let's talk about microtransactions and customisation in general.
It's blank, totally blank. 2/3 of helmet designes are imported from F1 2018 and the new ones ofted look even more blank.
Suits are ugly as nothing i have seen before and the same one applies for gloves. Luckily you can buy skins for 0.50€ to 2.50€ to not look like a plumber!!! Gameplaywise it's fine. It's again a step closer to a simulation game, which is a good thing. Overall I'd say the handling isn't so much different from F1 2018, but this time around the cars are much more understeery and it takes time to get used to. AI are ridiculously fast. Especially on corner exits (F for my pad comrades), I had to go down from 105 - 110 diff that i was running on F1 2018 (the famous AI inconsistency) to 95 on this game.
Even pro players have hard time racing on 110 this year. Finally the game state. It's full of bugs once again. And the fact that in time of writing this review (2 days prior to release) the game has been patched 3 times. To name a few most gamebreaking for me so far: the setups aren't working properly (stock setup is currently the best setup on most tracks), drivers and teams aren't balanced (Merc engines are faster than Ferrari's, Gasly is faster then Verstappen by a 0,5s and Alfa Romeo is slower than Williams) and ERS management doesnt make any sense so I'll put it here and pray that it's just a glitch (when you fully use your ERS over 1 lap, you'll loose up to 70% of your energy store.
WHAT THE F.K???) So to summ things up. F1 2019 is reskinned F1 2018 with F2 cars and better graphics. The biggest new features that we were promised to get are either blank or useless (such is the showroom. For me, despite the graphics and physics, this game has little to offer compared to F1 2018 and it falls short where it should be dominating its predecessor. For lack of new content and unfinished product in general (note: they were working over 2 years on this game) I can't give this one more than 5/10. Sadly this is the worst F1 intallment since 2015 and I hope that 2020 will be a banger compared to this year as 2016 was to 2015, back in the day.s Expand. Codemasters has a depressingly poor track-record of leaving these games with the same issues and then starting work on next years title, but Codemasters has a depressingly poor track-record of leaving these games with the same issues and then starting work on next years title, but they all end up similar, so I wonder what they'redoing all year and if they deserve my money.
You have to put in your details before you're allowed to reach the menu, which is a terrible idea if user data is lost (reinstalling the game, or the dreaded savegame corruption that plagued previous titles). There's no mouse input, and even the button layout is awkward, like taking 43 button presses just for a time trial on Abu Dhabi in a Williams. Why is the PC version so expensive when it's a lazy console port that crashes even after the release patches? Since F1 2010 the physics has been problematic, but F1 2018 was fun in being able to counter-steer to save potential spins early, yet F1 2019 goes back to the problem of no-grip spins that can't be recovered. Games are supposed to be interactive and skill-based, where's the fun of watching my car spin until stopping and not being able to do anything about it? I was excited to try the F2 cars, but they just understeer horribly and have weak brakes.
I tried an online race, the penalty system is still terrible, like getting a time penalty for 'corner cutting' after someone rammed me over a corner. For some reason everyone in my race seemed to lose connection one by one. There's an inbuilt league system, but it has a license mechanic that tracks your attendance percentage and safety rating, which will be useless due to the connection problems and the hopeless penalties.
The AI isn't too bad, and singleplayer races are an important part of F1 2019. I'm sure many people like doing short races, yet you can't set the race distance between 5 and 15 laps (no options between 5 laps or 25% race length). Time trials are slightly better than F1 2018 in terms of less stuttering, but there's still the distraction of having 'new leaderboard' or 'new rival' or 'new setup available' text appearing mid-lap while you're trying to concentrate. I tried it with 3 wheels, failing completely to get the DFGT steering degrees set to 360 so it matches the game, but eventually managed to get the G29 working at 360. Logitech is probably to blame for those particular problems, but Codemasters are equally as bad at keeping their end running, with F1 2010 and F1 2013 missing from the Steam store (and probably not working).
The Thrustmaster T300 seems to work fine atleast. The thing that really irks me with F1 2019 in particular is the pricing. How many years have the customers had to endure the same issues in these games, cars falling through the track; trouble with settings; program crashes; savegames; penalties; physics; disconnects, and Codemasters keep getting the F1 license and they keep setting the price high. But now they're selling skins.
I remember seeing customisation done right in Need for Speed 3 back in 1998 where you could pick the exact hue of your car, and again later in Race07 where SimBin gave you car templates to draw your own car skins you could share. But in F1 2019 where they could have done something groundbreaking there's silly things - like the only choice of a racing suit being blue or green, while others suit colours have a pricetag of £0.99 each. The reason I think skins are appreciated in CS:GO was because they were community-made, with a cut to the community creators, and the skins could be traded if the owner got bored of them.
Stickers complemented the skins and gave them personality. Codemasters had implemented paid skins badly in comparison. There's day-1 DLC, microtransactions, and even a pay-to-win style early access version if you paid more money (allowing you to gain valuable experience over the players that went for the cheaper version before the 'release day'). It's clear that Codemasters priority is to squeeze as much money as they can out of the F1 license and then start working on the next title, leaving the last one in whatever state they released it in.
F1 2019 feels like the cheap experience of a free to play game, yet has a high (underserved) pricetag. Also, the blatant corruption of 'critics' being friendly with publishers and being the only ones allowed to review the game even while the customers are playing it before the 'release date' has not gone unnoticed. The 'release date' is just a meaningless excuse to charge more money to play early, and then not allow genuine reviews by the customers during that period to criticize what turns out to be flawed product during a time of potentially high volume sales.
There's an inconvenient number of negative reviews by paying customers for the Codemasters F1 games, and there's a striking discrepancy between the customers average score and the 'critics' average scores across them.