F1 2011 - The Videogame!

[bneale]

Hello Everyone,

Just picked a copy of this up yesterday and I thought I would share my inital impressions with you guys. Reference Photo:



Let me first say, I'm not a huge F1 fan and don't really have a favourite team or anything. But I am a huge fan of Motorsports in general and I do watch F1 whenever its on TV from time to time. But playing the game so far is great!

I also purchased F1 2010 last year and so far Codemasters has really impressed me with some of the changes they have made with the new edition. The new edition is easier to drive the cars overall. It's not quite as easy to lose complete control as compared to the last game. That being said, you still can't just mash the gas coming out of every slow corner on prime tires. The game simply won't let you get the grip. Even with traction control set to medium. So I'm impressed so far with the handling of the cars.

I also really like the addition of the KERS and DRS system. For those of you who don't know, KERS is a kinectic energy recovery system which allows the car to store an electical charge which can be used at will by the driver. Simply push and hold the button and you get an instant boost of power until the charge runs out. DRS is a drag reduction system. DRS is actually a little flap on the rear wing which moves to an open or closed position and by doing so, you increase or decrease drag based on the position of the wing. This is most useful on long straights when your trying to pass another car. Open the wing up and ditch the downforce for extra passing speed.

Both systems work really well but take time getting used too. At first, I kept spinning the car in practice because I was opening the rear wing too soon on gentle highspeed corners. I kept taking the downforce off the rear because I was activating the DRS too early and it caused me to spin quite a lot. You do get used to this though once you've played with it a bit.

One of the things I don't really like is the fact that you can no longer do 30% or 40% race distances. Your stuck choosing between 20% or 50% which sucks because 30% was a perfect 45 minute race before. But no matter, I can live with doing 50% races. It just means I'm racing longer in 1 sitting.

Anyway, if you like racing games and have a PC, Xbox, or PS3, you should really check out F1 2011. It's a hard game to find in North America though. They seem to only bring a handful of games over here and once there gone, there gone. If you also have a steering wheel like I do, you REALLY need to try this game.

I haven't done a full race yet but I'm impressed so far. F1 has the best racing gameplay of all the racing games to date. I've had some of the most epic battles racing against the computer in F1 2010. I won't go into the details, but let me just say that I was racing for the full 45 minutes and it was really intense. Feels awesome to win the first race in this game. It feels like you actually acomplished something.

bneale