What’s on this week
VIDEOGAME F1 2018 RRP £44.99
Fernando Alonso has pulled his customary stunt and got his Mclaren further up the order than it deserves to be in the British Grand Prix. But we’re catching him in our Sauber, which has improved well enough over the course of the season to have both cars running in the points at Silverstone.
Passing Alonso, with the help of DRS, is quite straightforward, but hanging onto seventh until the finish is not. Alonso catches us napping on the brakes into Club with a lunge, and he’s back ahead. We make another pass, and a lap later he sweeps around the outside of us into Abbey, with a bold chop. We waste no time in trying to get back ahead on the brakes at Village, and Alonso just turns in! The side-to-side contact is heavy, but we both keep going, with Kevin Magnussen now hot on our heels, and Alonso stays close enough to launch one final attack at Club again. We force him to the outside, and just about hold on, taking a breathless seventh place.
In a post-race interview the Alonso collision comes up, and our decision to blame him (having watched replays first) has gone down badly with Mclaren. Oh well. The rest of the chat with the media is spent talking up Sauber, in the hope that the resulting morale boost speeds up developments back at the factory. It goes against everything we as Autosport journalists want from F1 drivers in the real world, but there are bigger motives than being entertaining in the press at play when you’re on the other side of the fence.
The above, in a nutshell, captures what makes the F1 2018 game great. The 2017 version certainly wasn’t broken, so Codemasters doesn’t need to try to fix anything specific this year – it just needed to build on what it already had, and it’s achieved that. Alonso’s feisty behaviour at Silverstone was a great example of the overhauled AI, meaning your computerised opponents are smarter, and much more aggressive, in both attack and defence.
The F1 2017 AI was good already, but this year’s game is the first version to feature rivals that will make realistic lunges – down the inside or outside – when the opportunity presents itself. You’ll have to learn to race them differently, and look out for drivers near the back taking huge risks at the start. In Canada we spotted Lance Stroll lunging from the back row to 13th at Turn 1!
The career mode at the heart of the game’s offline experience has been given a polish too. Interviews are back for the first time in a while, and they are much more in-depth than before. The questions you get asked are specific to what is going on in your career and incidents from your races, and your answers have an effect on how your team performs, and how you are viewed in the paddock. Sometimes the multiple-choice answers leave you boxed into a corner and having to give a negative answer, which is frustrating, but overall the experience of dealing with the media feels more relevant, and less repetitive, than it has in the past.
The handling tweaks to the cars are subtle, as you would expect during a stable phase of regulations in the real world, with the cars slightly easier to drive, but also easier to upset over an aggressive kerb or on worn tyres. One of the most notable changes on track is in the audio, where it’s clear a lot of work has gone into improving the sounds of the engines, on and off the throttle. It’s examples like that – and the addition of a manual ERS mode (although auto does a good job as well) – that show how deep Codemasters is digging under the surface of F1, beyond simply making the racing much more exciting. GLENN FREEMAN