GamesRelay

Name: F1 2009

Now under a new licensee, F1 2009 begins a new life on the Nintendo Wii. Will the new developers bring with them fresh concepts and a new direction to the genre, or stay with and refine the tried and true?

There are multiple game modes available in F1 2009, each requiring various levels of commitment, meaning that if you only have ten minutes to spend, or an entire afternoon, the game has you sorted. Quick Match gets you right behind the wheel of your racer where you can choose some basic options to dive into the game as fast as you can. The game opens up from here, leading into the Single Player menu. You can opt to play a Grand Prix Weekend, where a choice of options opens up. You can participate in practice sessions, three in all, as well as the Qualifiers and then finally the race itself. You can do as many or as few of the preamble races as you wish, but if you decide to ignore the Qualifiers, you'll end up near the back of the grid on the race day.

You may also take part in a Championship, going through an entire season of races with your chosen official driver. This involves going through seventeen races in the hopes of getting the most points at the end. Career follows much of the same formula, except it lasts for three seasons, and includes a management system. In this, you receive messages from various manufacturers, which, at the beginning, involve invitations to test practices leading to full time employment. After three seasons, the goal is to become the World Champion. The final mode is the Challenge type, which adds something special to the game. While the other modes are variations on standard races, the challenge mode adds unique goals in which you receive awards and ranking based on your performance. There are timed races where passing through goals increase your time, with an objective to pass through as many goals as possible before the time runs out; there are overtake challenges, tasking you with passing as many opponent drivers as you can before reaching the finish line. With over ten more types, there is a notable amount of variety to be gleaned from this mode.

All this is done from a unified profile, in which you enter your first name, surname, nationality and "short name" – a three character identifier for use during the race's timekeeping. This doesn't really come into play when racing as a preset official driver, yet when doing time trials and other modes; it becomes your identity, even painting the car in your national colours. The game is playable with both the Wiimote and Nunchuck, with the Classic Controller, and with a Wii Wheel. My personal preference is with the nunchuck attachment, and the analog stick adds an ease of control when turning. Considering the layout of Formula 1 tracks, with long straights with sharp turns, this is much more practical than manually turning the wheel in your hands, and takes quite a measure of practice to use effectively – you are going over 100mph of course! You can switch between both setups at any time without having to head into the options menu and the game will react accordingly – even during loading times.

The game plays in two major extremes. It is designed in a way that you can begin with many Driving Aids active to become used to the controls, and then ramp up the difficulty and turn off the Aids. These disable features such as crash damage, anti-spin mechanisms, and visual aids showing you the ideal movements to make and when to brake, and from playing both variations, it's a totally different experience when they're disabled. You are forced to take each turn with caution and experience; otherwise you'll find yourself spinning around in circles with a smoking engine. At higher difficulty levels, you have to be extremely good, particularly if you're playing with the penalties on. Any unsportsmanlike behaviour will have you trudging through the pit stop, so think twice before you take that shortcut across the grass.

The presentation of the menus is adequate and functional, though not enticing. The same repeating melody plays in the background, and can become torturous until you get into the race. While behind the wheel you have a great view of the low-poly environments with very simple trees and crowd effects. The vehicles themselves are blocky and lack the high quality detail you would expect from something that you're interacting with as the basis of the game. The Wii is certainly not a graphical powerhouse, but there are examples of better graphical presentation out there on the machine, even in its own genre. The graphics take a further hit when played in the two-player multiplayer mode, which is local play only. There are absolutely no online options available.

F1 2009 is quite conservative overall. The gameplay is well-designed, with tight handling and responsive action, but other than the variation served in the Challenge mode, there's little that'll hold your attention over an extended period of play. Most of the gameplay is to be had in mastering the tracks, and cutting away the safety lines the Driving Aids provide. Once you do that, the game offers little more – a problem some online implementation and other progressive features may have stalled but something one comes to expect from any past Formula 1 game. Nonetheless, any F1 enthusiast isn't likely to be disappointed with what is packaged here, and any Wii owner who fancies himself a bit of a Lewis Hamilton will settle right into it.