Some of my impressions about the game from the 1st race:
Started 7 season long career with Lotus, game set to Expert, AI legendary.
1st race, Bahrain. Done around 15 laps before going into qualifying, my driving was far from perfect, but I still managed to get into Q2 on 14th position. My start position was 16th, it would be higher but Alonso f*cked my lap, AI is just awfully slow through the slowest part of the track. Anyway, happy with my starting position I went into the race (30% distance, 15 laps). Had to do some restarts because of my bad driving (spinning and going off track). Then everything finally started to go OK for me and I've got up to 11th place before the AI pit stops. I've started the race on hard tyres, so my pit stop was in 10th lap. Got out of the pits in 15th position with a possibility to get back to at least 11th. But on lap 12 my front tyre decided that it wanted to have a puncture. Not too surprised that it happened, because I went hard over the kerbs a few times, but I was pissed off anyway. Closed the game (btw. is there an option to retire from the race other than crashing?) and after some 20 minutes decided to try again. This time I've set the race distance to only 20%. Again started on hard tyres, AI mostly on soft ones. They pitted mostly between 3rd and 5th lap IIRC, I've done my pit stop on 7th lap. Before the AI pit stops I've got up to 10th place, before my pit stop I was in 2nd place behind Massa who started the race on hard tyres. He was mostly pulling away from me, Vettel behind me was about 1,5 seconds a lap faster than me. After my pit stop I was surprised that I came back on track in 7th place, I was expecting to be much lower. I've finished the race in 6th position after overtaking MS on the final lap. So I can't really say that AI gained anything by pitting before me. But it's possible that things will be different in Melbourne (going to set race distance back to 30%, hoping that it will give me more realistic results).
To sum it up, AI is too slow (at least in Bahrain), finishing 6th in a Lotus on the hardest settings should be impossible for me with almost no practise on the track (I haven't driven Bahrain in any game before).
Other things that should be better IMO:
-more data on the steering wheel (GP4 style)
-corner cutting warning is too "sensitive", I went off track with 2 wheels, on the outer side of the track, and I got a warning
-grey mirrors, possibly a bug, because they were fine on FP and qualifying but turned grey for the race
-menus are just awful
-no race statistics about fastest laps, place progressing,... basically it's missing the menu after the race that GP4 has
-there's no effect when touching wheels with other drivers (it doesn't lift you into the air or try to spin you)
-no feeling for back of the car when rear wheels are spinning (it doesn't slide left/right, etc.)
-no car sliding that would require slight steering wheel correction (at least I haven't noticed it yet)
-when you're going to spin, just press the brake pedal and the car will correct it self... that's just stupid IMO
Despite all, it's nice to have an F1 game after so many years. I hope they will improve things for F1 2011
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2010 12:22PM by anze89.