Formula 1 2018 Review - Manage Your Racing Career on the Track and in the Media

Written by Stephen Varner on August 17, 2018

Reviews: Half racer and half management, you are in control of your career as you race on different tracks and craft your persona in the pit.

2018 brings more than just a new logo to Formula 1. This year's racing season has brought a couple of noticeable changes and so has this years official game. Codemasters has taken the excellent foundation that they had with last year's game and dressed it up in a few places without shaking up the structure that was used to build such a great game last year. Among the first of the changes you'll notice is to the cars themselves. The halo cockpit protection devices that are newly mandatory this year will be fixed to every 2018 car and this may take a bit of getting used to for drivers like myself that generally prefer the cockpit camera as there will be a metal bar right down the center of your field of view. It's a bit more visually claustrophobic but easy enough to get used to after a few races or avoided altogether by switching to the camera mount view that sits a bit higher. While the track selection for 2018 remains the same as last year the classic car selection has been expanded to include a deeper roster of cars from the 70's and 80's. This includes the 1976 McLaren M23 and Ferrari 312 made famous by James Hunt and Niki Lauda respectively.

Perhaps the biggest change to the career mode is the focus on dealing with the media. Over the course of the season you'll be interviewed by a reporter character that will grill you on the events of the day good or bad and your responses will feed into a reputation system that will impact your relationship not only with your team and the different departments therein but also how other teams think of you. Each racing team will prefer either a sportsman or showman personality type and your interaction with the media will swing how you're perceived in one direction or the other. This will factor into contract moves and your reputation throughout your career. Other additions include the option to assign your career driver a name that will be used by commentators within the game. The name selection itself has dozens of options and while mine wasn't available I was able to find something close enough that I was happy to change my driver name to better represent my racing alter ego. There's a few key things that cannot be changed once you've started your season in career mode. Your weekend structure of practices and qualifying type as well as AI difficulty will be locked in once you pick it in the beginning. Of these I only wished I could change AI difficulty mid season when I felt like the challenge level wasn't quite where I wanted it to be. It's probably a good idea to play around in the Grand Prix or Championship mode before starting in career so you can feel out where you want the difficulty to be at. If you're able to get out ahead of the pack or take pole position in every single race it can rob you of some of the spectacular moments and victories that you'll achieve by fighting your way up the grid. In a sport where the margin for error is razor thin every clean lap and every opponent you pass can feel like a harrowing achievement.

If you're not in the mood to delve into all the management aspects of career mode you can spend time in Championships mode and test yourself in over a dozen sets of events, each with it’s own specific theme or set of rules that will require different race strategies. If you simply want to jump into the shoes of your favorite driver and play through the 2018 season you can do that here. One event features only races with inclement weather while another is a set of series of spec races so that none of your opponents will have a performance advantage. Doing well in these events will earn you the points you'll need to unlock the latter half of championships on offer. With Grand Prix mode you can build your own custom Championship with modern or classic F1 cars and any combination of the 24 available track set ups. Time trial speaks for itself. Pick a car, pick a track, choose whether it's wet or dry and see how your lap time compares on a global leaderboard. Lastly for single player offerings is the Event mode which will rotate over time and gives you a specific scenario and goals to accomplish. For example, the event up at the time of this writing puts you in the shoes of Carlos Sainz near the end of the Belgian GP. You're in 14th place and you need to get into the top 8 by the end of the race.

Multiplayer offerings are a little bit lean compared to the meaty single player content. You can join ranked or unranked races but if you're looking for something a little more structured you can start your own online championship in which you can customize what tracks and rules you want and complete it over time with your friends or fill it out with random players online. You can have multiple championship saves at a time and return to them whenever you want.

The game looks great both in motion or in photo mode with only a couple intermittent performance or visual blemishes. I noticed a small amount of tearing that seemed specific to the Australian GP circuit on Xbox One X and the the lip sync frequently doesn't quite match up with the audio when characters are talking to you but those small distractions aside the game looks crisp and beautiful in 4K and with HDR support. Every race presentation emulates the style of a real world Formula 1 broadcast and makes the intro and outro to an event look and feel genuine.

F1 2018 is at it's best when you dive head first into it's deep career mode. Half racer, half management sim, you can shape your car and career whichever way you see fit, it excels by leaning all the way into what sets Formula 1 apart from other types of racing. It's a game where considering the perks of a contract is as much a part of the experience as the time you spend putting rubber to road. F1 2018 embraces the management and driver personality aspects that make Formula racing different and special and delivers a game that is faithful to the sport.