F1 2013 Review

The yearly sports franchise is always making small steps forward, with the occasional leap and large-scale overhaul. It’s something which Codemasters are really starting to grapple with in F1 2013, their fourth entry, and their solution is quite an interesting one.

By and large, those of you who have played F1 2012 will feel instantly familiar with great swathes of the game. The game loads up and you’re presented with an F1 car in a large testing facility of sorts, compared to last year’s fancy wind-tunnel-like building. The menu layout is practically the same, the options generally look the same and even the menu music is identical to last year’s effort.

This is an exercise in evolution then, which is apparent everywhere you look. The Young Driver Test has evolved slightly to allow more experienced gamers to skip the first day and then use the second day’s more challenging tests as a way to unlock faster teams from the off in 5-year Career mode. It’s a neat twist where, much like in reality, an impressive showing could genuinely affirm a big team’s faith in signing a young driver.

Actually driving the cars is a joy, as I felt instantly at home with both a controller and a wheel – the version tested was on PC, allowing me to play with the Driving Force GT – jumping back and forth between 2012 and 2013. My admittedly unrefined senses kept telling me that the handling model is very much the same as last year, if not a little easier and with less of a propensity to oversteer. Maybe.

Thankfully turning the difficulty levels up, with fewer assists and faster AI, provided much more of a challenge and I certainly found myself scrapping harder for my positions. Even so, I was able to bully my competition around during a race, and often end up positioned a fair bit better than I should have been.

The Season Challenge returns with a new roster of tracks, but holding onto that core idea of letting people churn through a season in one or two sittings. You pick a rival driver to beat out on track, and then in a best-of-three situation you can win his seat to progress to faster cars and start to challenge for the title.

Each of the ten races is handled with a quick qualifying session followed by a 5-lap race, so it’s a nice and easy way to put in time. However, there is also the addition of mid-race saving, which is excellently handled. You can quite literally pause, save and exit at any point during a race. When you come back it will load up and give you a single free rewind, so that you can pick a sensible starting point and not spin off the track. It’s simple and it’s perfect.

A further evolution comes from last year’s Champions mode – tucked away in the Proving Grounds alongside Time Trial and Time Attack – has expanded into a much broader Scenario Mode. Instead of focussing on the various champions, there’s a nice little pseudo-narrative of a driver and their career, spread across the twenty short scenarios; bite-sized snippets of high pressure to test yourself against.

These scenarios also push into the new F1 Classics mode. This is where Codies are really able to spread their wings and take the experience into new directions. The main game features a handful of cars from the 1980s, with 90s cars added in a DLC and pre-order pack –not tested – and a lonely Ferrari 312T2 from the 70s available from signing up to RaceNet, but which can only be used for time trials and in the first example of a RaceNet challenge.

Alongside the cars come drivers – one from the era and another a legend from the team, so that Gerhard Berger and Michael Schumacher both drive in the 1988 Ferrari F1-87/88C – and tracks with Brands Hatch and Jerez on-disc as well as Imola and Estoril in the DLC pack.

These cars and tracks serve to really elevate what could otherwise have been a thoroughly unremarkable release. They’re more interesting to drive for those already used to the modern cars, with varying handling and pace across the board, and needing a little more finesse and control. The Lotus 98T stands out as a particularly tricky beast, with a turbo-charged engine that makes it much more difficult to handle than the similarly turbo-charged F1-87/88C. A dab of Traction Control makes them both more accessible, but they are nowhere near as planted and steady as the Williams FW12, which is just an absolute pleasure to drive.

The past is quite clearly where the future of the franchise lies, but in the present the F1 Classics still just miss that little something, I feel. The presentation for the F1 Classics is spot on, as you’re confronted with a sepia filter – you can turn this off – a more classical looking HUD and cars which shoot flames out of their exhausts and kick up sparks as they bump along the ground at high speed.

However it doesn’t quite deliver on the fantasies. It’s utterly respectful of drivers who have passed away and their legacies, meaning racers such as Ayrton Senna and James Hunt don’t feature in the game, but so many fans will want to race against those names. Similarly, this is just a slice of such a vast treasure-trove of racing history, and it needs more teams and long-retired brands to follow in the footsteps of Lotus, Ferrari and Williams, and license their cars to fill out a broader race grid.

This is the first step on the path to something exciting and infinitely promising, but it just makes me want that next release more keenly. It’s not just the roster of cars or the way that this breaks the status quo, but that aside from F1 Classics, Codies seem to be preparing a big leap to next-gen machines.

It’s like the point in the F1 season where a team’s focus shifts to next year, and forgives some of their remaining niggles in favour of getting a good start. Tiny things like not allowing a full set up screen for a one-shot qualifying session, not having an “equal” performance setting for 80s or 90s cars when heading online. The kinds of small issues which really start to stand out from an otherwise slick and polished experience.

Next year’s real life F1 season is set to try and shake up the grid with new engine regulations and a handful of drivers hopping around from team to team. The prospect for a season of racing which breaks the current status quo is tantalising, and in the same vein I want the F1 2014 game to knock my socks off.

F1 2013 is a solid outing for the series, taking the successes of the past and building on them incrementally, whilst adding an exciting glimpse of what’s to come with F1 Classics. It might leave me wanting more, but F1 2013 is the best and most comprehensive release so far.

Score: 8/10