Review of F1 2021 -apkrig
On paper, this year’s F1 from Codemasters is special. It is published for the first time under the heading Electronic Arts. For the first time, a story mode appears in it. For the first time, the game will use the potential of the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5. And for the first time in a long time, historic cars are disappearing. For the first time, all of these are framed by the fact that the growing popularity of F1 – which has been at the forefront of the Drive to Survive series on Netflix – is likely to bring brand new players and more than ever a diametrically different experience than fighters who have spent the past years with the series.
Contents
Story start
As I have indicated many times, the annual F1 game is considered a personal test of patience and diligence, as I get to the new year after a few months break from the previous one. I always feel that one has to learn everything from the beginning, which brings with it the need to start a career, not skip training and try to squeeze the maximum out of your chosen one or your monopost. But just as most players had this year, my first steps led to the much-discussed and discussed Braking Point mode, in which the developers wanted to elaborate a story outlined two years ago and wink at those who got to know the pilots and stables boss not during the broadcasts. races, but on Netflix. The result is the story of Aiden Jackson – a young pilot who comes from F2 to the royal class and has to deal with a number of circumstances, where not only his abilities fall remotely.
The story is told through a set of very nice cutscenes, the quality of which significantly exceeds all other scenes in which pilots or journalists perform. The face animation is great, it’s perfectly complemented by dubbing, and the things the characters say sound very natural. Of course, Aiden is not alone in his stable – his counterpart is the ending pilot Casper Akkerman, who has had a successful career, at the end of which he became a little bitter. He too is trying to deal with a number of problems, and one of them is the need to reconcile that the world of Formula 1 already belongs to the young generation. Therefore, in some places a very hostile relationship flares up between him and Aiden, which, of course, goes through a proper development and one very interesting twist, complementing another perspective on the whole event. Unfortunately, I must state that the scenario, respectively. Some of its sub-parts may be overly Hollywood and the events of the actual Formula 1 attract considerably hair. Sure, rivalry is the basis of everything – all the more so in his own stable – but what Aiden and Casper show, or how the bastard Devon Butler enters into their conflict, is more reminiscent of a stupid high school series.
Slightly divergent scenario
The problem is also if you are – even in combination with one of the three levels of difficulty offered – very good. The scenario of the story is ready for the variant that you will not succeed and you will not fulfill any of the tasks, but if you manage to commute in the first three places, or even win one of the races, a line about how Jackson fails to meet the expectations brought from F2 doesn’t make much sense. I was also disappointed by the small number of story dividers and the need to leave the entire season, albeit a quarter shortened in length, as part of the time jumps of the season. For my taste – and I had such a problem with the story mode The Road in the FIFA series – there is a lot of competition in Braking Point and there is little attention to the story. In addition, many moments are filled only by telephone dialogs, which lead nowhere, you can make no choice in them and only indicate that the developers probably did not have the space to fully process the mode. Therefore, I don’t get any great impressions from the approximately six-hour fashion, although I admit that some moments are quite strong and nicely processed.
The nice thing is that you can also use different settings in a split-screen, which is also represented, giving you the opportunity to compete with players with completely different abilities and experiences.
So if you want to buy F1 2021 just because of the story mode, accept a slight warning from me, you will probably not be completely satisfied. Thanks to the huge level of difficulty setting of artificial intelligence, simulation as such and a number of helpers, you can adjust the rest of the race exactly to your style and jump to other modes, either as a seasoned veteran with a steering wheel or as a complete novice with a gamepad. Not one of them is bad from my point of view, just because the F1 series does not try to compete with, for example, rFactor or Assetto Corsa. It’s also nice that you can use different settings in split-screen, which is also represented, giving you the opportunity to compete with players with completely different abilities and experiences. Playing together is probably the defining element of this year, which comes with a career for two players, which you can approach as cooperating riders of one stable, or rivals from different teams. In this case, the race takes place only online, you will not play a career in a split-screen, but nothing else should limit you. As in a career for one, you will have access to the development of your own stable and monopost and several other innovations.
Career for two. Together and against each other
One of them is unexpected events that can affect your entire racing company. They appear randomly and always come with two ways to deal with them. It is, for example, dealing with the fatigue of people in a factory or, for example, considering whether to participate in a charity event or not. Your decision always brings with it a clearly defined impact and can be reflected in a new attribute of pilots – concentration. The developers are probably trying to suggest that there are a lot of seemingly disparate things in the world of F1, too, and it must be admitted that this is a pleasant novelty that gives perhaps a bit of a monotonous career the opportunity to deal with something else for a while. I sincerely welcome the redesigned training system, which serves primarily to gain the points needed to research the individual parts of the monopost. Last year, a set of tasks that you had to complete in training to keep your team competitive was waiting for you, but in the third and fourth year, especially if you played short races in quick succession, F1 was already looking for an unpleasant grind. However, you can now play a small mini-game in which the remaining time and probability with which traditional tasks are completed automatically are decisive. This is a helpful step, because nowhere do you have to decide firmly how the workouts will be processed and two of the three will need to be circled by themselves and the third will be simulated in this way.
As for the development, it also underwent a slight adjustment, especially in terms of clarity of processing, but otherwise I did not come across anything fundamentally new beyond the organization of individual upgrades. And this is a song that will play as long as F1 2021 runs in front of you. I don’t want to sound a bit like a mischief, but apart from the innovations described above, the game looks like a fairly accurate copy of last year. Let’s look for differences, for example, in an even bigger difference between the behavior of F2 and F1 cars, partial setting of career rules, or its connection with the MyTeam mode, through which you can get your own stable and the second driver to the championship. News can be found, for example, in the new showroom, where you can look at individual cars. A much more significant novelty is the reworked sound system, thanks to which the differences between the individual engines stand out perfectly, but finally the ominous roar of downshifting is also added to the game, although it could be even more distinctive to my taste. And if you ask about the graphics, nothing came up in this field either, thanks to which we could call F1 2021 as next-gen.
Nice on PC, even fous better on consoles
Although I played on both PC and PS5 and the video footage comes from both of these versions, we still watch the same engine that runs the last few episodes. The new consoles can take full advantage of fast loading and limited ray tracing effects in shots outside of racing, but this is not a suggested revolution. In the case of the PS5, I still have to mention the adaptive triggers, which of course get involved in the work and try to give the player a little extra feeling. This effect is very pronounced on the brake pedal, which puts quite a lot of resistance when trying to brake from full speed. For throttle, the response is less pronounced, but not a single pedal / lever adds anything in the end, which should significantly improve the quality of your steering. On the other hand, the haptic response is completely absent-feeling, or the rumble of the gamepad did not seem to me to be anything special, let alone that I had to read anything from it.
What about the ray tracing?
As it was said before the release or in the review itself, the F1 2021 also boasted the effects of ray tracing on the new consoles. But the Codemasters developers explained that they didn’t have time to focus enough on the technology, and for that reason, authentic reflections only appear in repeated shots and environments outside of their own racing. What is important is the smoothness of the game, which can be kept without major problems, which is a priority for developers. They also did this by disabling ray tracing on the PS5, where it caused problems, and developers need to fix the problem before the graphics enhancements return to the game.
The remaining parts of the presentation remain identical to the previous year. I am explicitly irritated by a single animation for the winning pilot, who rolls out of a monopost after reaching the pits. Also, the celebrations on the stage are completely identical and the developers themselves shorten them to a necessary evil without national anthems and nothing special. The processing of the tracks also remains exactly the same, there is no other lighting or additions to the details, and the new circuits, together with the adjustment of the Spanish Grand Prix, will not arrive until the upcoming update. Eroded to the bone, the F1 2021 has on several occasions offered the same, not a bad feeling from driving, this year wrapped in a new story mode and interesting partial changes. But somehow I can’t agree that the historical monoposts had to disappear from the game because the developers couldn’t devote enough time to them. For many players, this is an interesting refreshment and deletion of old formulas, or variants of some tracks, as a step back.
In short, even with the story regime and partial changes, F1 2021 is not as good a year as last year. If you are a complete newcomer and have no previous experience, you will not find any better formula game on the market and you will have fun for tens of hours, but if you still have F1 2020 installed and regret six hours of B-movie with some nice moments, at least I don’t see a reason to update yet. Of course, provided that you are not attracted to multiplayer, which is just a variation of the same races, but logically against live players. This year, there will be no major problems with it, and in addition, there is – again to meet newcomers – a quick start to the game without more detailed settings. But if you have friends you play with often, this is no reason to have F1 2021 at the start.
