Another year, another entry into the F1 series of racing games and while it has been a few years since I last sunk any significant time into the series, I figured I would know exactly what I was getting, that turned out to be wrong. The question is, does their claim of a more open racing experience exist, or is it stuck in the pits?

F1 2020 offers up a few distinct game modes, there is the traditional My Driver career, where you can create a driver and compete in the season, aiming to be the champion. On top of that the Grand Prix mode lets you take an actual driver onto the track, competing for victory, but there is also time trial and more. Returning players will likely enjoy the fact that these modes are back, but it is likely the addition of the new My Team mode that will excite long time fans. My Team is like the My Driver but expanded to cover the entire aspect of the sport, from the creation of the team, through to racing in events and everything in between. Here you will create a driver, if you don’t already have one from My Driver, then select your engine type, team name, team colours and logo, racing partner, sign a sponsor and a few extra things, and that is before your first interview. The entire process is long and slow, but it needs to be, the early decisions can impact your progress as time goes on, sign a sponsor with some tight bonus restrictions, and you might find funs lacking later in the season.

Between races, you need to mange your team, which covers aspects like ensuring that people are paid, interviews are done and don’t deal any damage to your reputation and testing out new ideas. All this comes together, to create one exceptionally dry experience, not to say that there are some people that won’t enjoy it, but when you spend hours staring at charts, expenditure reports and such, it loses the appeal of a game and starts to feel more like work. The My Driver mode does have some touches of this as well, but as you are mostly just focused on the racing, it is easier to ignore it and just drive. When you take part in any of the modes that play out over a season, a weird little thing happens, if you race a full season, you get all the tracks, race a shorter one, either 16 or 10 events, the game limits the courses you can access and it’s the same each time, I could find no way to stop it. What it means is if you do a shorter season, you can’t race in Australia, which is honestly just weird and bizarre, now there might be an option for it, but I couldn’t find it and results in some mixed feelings about the races.

Speaking of racing, the game is far more accessible than it has ever been, well, at least in the modern games, with plenty of assists to enable to make it easier for you. Something that I thought was a nice touch, was that with the press of a button, you could enable a casual mode, which turned on a number of assists, to make it so you didn’t have to worry about specific things, the downside was that, you needed to still tweak things if you found them to restrictive. One example is that the steering is very limited, only allowing you to turn on a bend, if the car is going slow enough, while you can easily understand the reason as to why, it makes learning the game harder, so finding a happy medium between all the settings is going to be a must, if you are new to a sim racer. The multiplayer options are pretty broad as well, which is nice and apart from the standard online options, F1 2020 brings back the split-screen racing of old and reading up, it seems this was one people wanted.

All of that matters little though if the overall racing feels like driving through sludge and thankfully, Codemasters know a thing or two about racing games and it feels divine. Racing without assists takes some control, you have to hit the line, manage the speed and control your turns, but once you get into the right mindset, you can start setting some blistering laps around all the circuits. Those who seek more of a challenge can try with manual shifting, but that is beyond me, especially with some tracks, like the Circuit of the Americas and its constant turns. Speaking of tracks, all the circuits from the official season of the F1 are here, as are the ones from the F2, so there is plenty to race upon, even the new tracks like the Hanoi Street Circuit from Vietnam is here and looks so nice.

Something else that looks nice is the games presentation, at least in some areas, others need lot of work, but let’s start with the good. The game, when you are speeding down a straight at 200km, with cars right behind you, the sun shining and everything else going on, looks amazing, the sense of speed alone is crazy. By default, the game puts you the camera at the front of the car, so you can feel that speed, but even if you put it in the cockpit, or behind the cars, the speed is still present. When you go into a new race, you get a really well put together introduction on the track, turns, elevation changes and more, it helps explain how you should approach the track, which is helpful. When you see all the cars on the grid, or even in replay, the attention to detail, highlights on the cars and more, all shine and look amazing, but just don’t look at the people.

This is where the visuals fall apart, anytime the game needs to focus on people, it shows that while Codemasters know cars, they suck at people. The animations are stiff, faces are janky at best, Nintendo 64 level at worst and no matter how often you see them, they don’t improve and while you might think for a car game, this is not a big deal, except it is. Given the new additions in the My Team mode, you will have to take part in interviews, spend time in the R&D sections of the garage and deal with more folks, which means seeing them. Given the clunky animations, it is hard to take an interview seriously, when they spend time trying to ask you questions, being distracted by weird faces is not fun.

On the audio side, things are still mixed, just not to the extreme as they are on the visual side of things. The cars, which are the stars, all sound great and it matters not, if you are racing around tracks in a 1988 McLaren F1 car, or the modern Mercedes F1 car, they sound distinctive. The modern cars have more of a whir to them, while the older cars are little more mechanical and grounded, the distinction is fine, especially as you get closer to the years, but they are there. The games music also sounds wonderful, when it kicks in, though some variety in the menu music would be welcome, most of the time the music is just there, but it serves its purpose. The voice acting is where things are the weirdest, when they have the professional commentators in, things sound good, the intro to each track is solid and provides clear information, but when they show who is on what position on the grid, it sounds disjointed. The other side is the interviews, and other voices you hear, they sound phoned in, like the people recording them didn’t really care and if you just race, you won’t hear them, but they are still there.

F1 2020 is a great game, for those that are invested into the sport, but for those thinking it might be a fun little racer, you had better think again. Outside of the racing, the game is dry, graphs and decisions to make, provide a sense of work, not game and while that might be for some, it won’t be for all. The new options for a more casual racing experience are fine, but it takes some tweaking to find the perfect spot for it, between assisting and hindrance.