For both Formula 1 fans as well as racing fans in general, short of a professional F1 simulator, playing Codemasters’ F1 series games is definitely the next best thing.
Checking out Gamespot’s review for the PC version of F1 2015 is definitely a good thing, if you’re planning on trying out the game. It will probably save you the trouble of becoming frustrated with your keyboard and the lack of control you have over the car.
The reviewer also finds what he calls “serious technical issues” but I’d rather focus on the fact that the cars are more realistic to drive this time around.
Fighting off oversteer is definitely good for “business”, because modern-day F1 cars have massive amounts of torque – and that needs to be reflected within the game. We can’t have cars that are notoriously easy to drive whereas in real life it’s a massive struggle to keep them in check when accelerating out of a corner.
The problem is that you can’t do those things very well on a keyboard. You can’t really give it “half-throttle” or accelerate at different rates all that well, which means you need to either get your hands on a controller or better yet, a wheel.
If you ask me, the wheel is the way to go, though I’m going to try out the controller and get back to you with a review of my own – since I’m a big fan of the series.
After spending some time in a few real F1 simulators (latest one being from Lotus), I’ve come to appreciate the fact that Codemasters have been trying to make their F1 game as realistic as possible.
Unfortunately, it looks like this year’s game is plagued by stability issues, a few graphics issues as well as faulty car physics (during crashes).
I’ve already tried F1 2015 on the PC (ran into some of the issues being discussed in the review), where I also noticed that the McLaren-Honda doesn’t have it’s recently received “facelift”, while the Force India doesn’t have its new nostrils.
Hopefully a patch will fix those issues, along with the rest.