Even for those who're into their racing games, F1 is a bit like Marmite - you either love it, or you hate it. Fans will wax lyrical about the precision, the speed, and the technicality, while everyone else just sees a procession of cars with not enough crashing. And while the former are well catered to by Codemasters' usual F1 titles, whose focus on realism is such that we're surprised they don't get you to construct the car manually, by hand first, and whack you with something large and heavy when you crash, their latest game, F1 Race Stars, is designed to appeal to a more non-traditional audience, and potentially even take the fight to the moustachioed one himself.
Taking its cues rather heavily from Mario Kart, F1 Race Stars is a cartoony, weapon fuelled rollick that has about as much in common with the procession of F1 as the Queen does with R&B. Although it features real teams and racers, both the cars and the drivers themselves have been stylised to within an inch of their lives, with giant heads, and uncanny likenesses abound. Meanwhile, rather than racing around actual F1 tracks, you'll instead be speeding through courses that are rather loosely based on the track's country of origin than the course itself. After taking a trip through a giant castle in Germany with an oompah band providing the soundtrack, you'll be dodging a giant octopus in an underwater tunnel in Australia, hanging on for dear life around loop the loops in Singapore, and ducking as you whizz between the rails of the Ferrari roller coaster in Abu Dhabi. F1 would be a lot more fun if it were more like this.
You can almost smell the lederhosen
While F1 2012 did its best to stay true to real life (to the point where the shortest race you could do took half an hour), as you may expect, plenty of liberties have been taken with Race Stars. For a start, the races are only two to three laps long - and rather than relying on your driving skills alone, you now have a variety of power-ups you can collect as you race around the tracks. Ranging from giant red bubbles that seek out your competitors, and giant yellow bubbles that bounce off the walls until they hit something, to, er, giant blue bubbles that you drop behind you to trap competitors, it's fair to say the power-ups aren't quite as varied as you may hope - although it's certainly not a problem. Outside of the many bubbles, two of the most useful power-ups in the game are also ones that have been designed to help people near the tail of the pack get back in the game - one sees you riding a giant water bottle as it rockets towards the front of the track, while the other teleports you miles down the course, in an attempt to keep things tight.
And, as has become something of a trend for kart based racers this year, the entire game lets you play through with up to three of your friends and family in tow in four player split-screen. A rather nice touch, and one that helps make the game a much more sociable affair, you'll be able to play through each of the game's tournaments (a series of tracks grouped together to become a cup), take on a time trial, and even go online in split-screen. It's certainly an impressive touch - and one we'd love to see other Codemasters games pick up too.
But despite being a more cartoony affair, a lot of the standards you'd expect from a Formula 1 themed game still make their presence felt here - although possibly in a slightly different way. One of the power-ups is a safety car, which stops anyone overtaking the person in first place (useful if you're just approaching the finish), whilst the KERS boost instead becomes a coloured section of road, found on particularly tricky corners. Although it's terribly explained in the game, the idea here is, as you go round the corner, to release, and then hold the accelerator several times in order to power up a battery behind your car. Stay on the road, and when you leave the section, you'll get a nice boost of power. It's handy enough - but we wish it was better explained in the game. Again, in a game that's meant to appeal to new players, having a poorly explained boost system doesn't exactly keep the playing field level.
Bubbles can easily make you come a cropper.
Sadly, some of the other more "realistic" aspects that have been carried over are less welcome. Most frustrating is fact your cars can take damage. One of the golden rules of kart/arcade racing games has always been that your cars don't take damage - if only because being able to knacker your car makes the game a lot harder for beginners to get into. While you can't total your car, if you take a few hits, you'll find your car slowing down quite substantially, which can be particularly galling for novices. Rather than giving them all the help they can get, new drivers will instead be crashing into a wall, wrecking their car, and then trundling at a snail's pace until they find the next pit, coming in a firm 12th place. It's not just weapons that can damage you, either - random environmental hazards that you come across during the levels will happily knock you for six, too . Particularly annoying are the random spurts of water that shoot out of the sea on the Australian level, and can bash up your car without giving you chance to avoid it.
But by far the most damaging part of F1 Race Stars is that, much like Little Big Planet Karting, and, to a lesser extent, SEGA All Stars Racing Transformed, has a difficulty level that's all over the place. Even on the easiest, you'll often struggle to come in the top three - in fact, playing on our own, we were regularly coming in somewhere between the middle and the bottom three, even on the easiest. With a full compliment playing (and presumably the other three absorbing some of the flak from the rest of the field), we were regularly challenging for first place, but it was still a bit hit and miss - sometimes we'd be first, yet at other times we'd be sixth. It doesn't help matters much that one of the tracks in the game is an exclusive pre-order bonus for those who pre-ordered from GAME - unlocked for those people, but locked for the rest of us.
But it's the difficulty that's most frustrating. F1 Race Stars gets a lot of things right - with full split-screen support for four players, a decent mix of power-ups, and some pretty fantastical track design, there's certainly plenty of appeal here - and you can play through all of the cups without having to worry about unlocking any first. It's an impressive attempt - but with cars that take damage, and a poorly balanced difficulty system holding things back, F1 Race Stars isn't a must buy - but it could be worth a flutter if you see it cheap, and have a group of family and friends who'll play with you.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
