Got a chance to play the review code at a friend's last night, some impressions:
- The driving itself does feel pretty good, especially in wet conditions. When it's dry, the game seems to be a bit too forgiving at times (when driving over curbs, for example) but overall I can't complain. What bothered me a bit was the sensibility of the controls. I was using the analog stick of the gamepad but it felt like I was driving with the D-Pad, if that makes any sense? Maybe there's an option to change the sensibility, I didn't check.
- The AI was doing a pretty good job at blocking my overtaking attempts but they crashed into me a few times when I was clearly in front. Might be realistic unless it happens to often, I can't tell from the limited time I've played.
- Set-ups don't seem to have much influence on the driving and the options are pretty limited but that was to be expected.
- I was incredibly annoyed by the damage system (and Codemasters' attempts to cover it up). Unless you drive at 300 km/h into a wall, the worst that can really happen during a race is a broken front wing. What happened to Hamilton in Monza seems impossible to recreate in the game. I tried to get the car flying by driving on another car's tires but that didn't seem to work either. :lol
- I noticed a few slowdowns, most of them happened while driving through the pit lane. (Does anyone know if drive-through penalties exist, by the way? I hit another car once during a race and was only told that 10 seconds would be added at the end of the race.)
- Load times felt pretty long.
- Multiplayer doesn't work yet (I think) and I didn't have enough time to try the campaign, so no impressions on that. You probably know about missing features, so I won't list them.
All in all, I strongly disagree with everyone who compares F1 2010 to Geoff Crammond's works. The Grand Prix games were deep simulations of the sport while F1 2010, in my opinion, is a great looking arcade game with a relatively realistic driving model, but still an arcade game. And that's perfectly fine -- if you don't expect a simulation, it's definitely fun and you'll probably be happy with it.
The difference is ridiculous.
In fantasy tracks you can move things around, add them, use less demanding stuff that still looks good, this is harder to pull of when you are recreating reality.
