I can taste the champagne. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t.
Both not-quite-Ferrari cars exited the not-quite Monaco Grand Prix, taking with them the dominant force that had monopolized the podium at three races in 1970. is on its way.
Feeling secure.
Then one of our cars hit a barrier and everything became more dangerous. It all depends on my remaining rider, Englishman Tim Morstan – who sports a terrible goatee and a ’70s haircut – to take it home. All he had to do was complete the mission without retreating too far lest he get mugged by one of the few threats left behind. For about thirty laps, I watched on tenterhooks as the dots on his screen moved dangerously through the needle between obstacles I couldn’t see, but I knew they were there.
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Tim came home and won. He would win all ten next season to easily capture his first championship. The season after that he would not be able to defend the title, although he scored points with Antonio Villalba, the new teammate I hired for him, he was a naturally jealous guy and if he drove A worse car than his and he would falter.
When you play the career mode of Golden Lap, the racing management sim created by Art of Rally and Absolute Drift studio Funselektor Labs in partnership with Strelka Games, you’ll write your own history like this. This mode is one of the highlights of the game, and when I played the Steam demo of Golden Lap earlier this year, I had the opportunity to dig a little deeper than I did, and I’m happy to report that I got to experience a lot in the game. Love is just as lovely after more time.
The audio and visuals blend together to create something that’s highly enjoyable but can be instantly ripped apart to convey what it’s like to have one of the cars buzzing around your track map hitting an obstacle. seriousness. The simple gameplay loop is to build a team by hiring four people with personality quirks and stats you like, then decide how much performance risk you want to take on a baseline car. You always have to think quickly about which tire you should use, how much fuel you can burn, or how to manage the pressure on your driver if you ask them to push to overtake, or leave your pursuers behind.
It’s all still great, and it’s mixed in with some other pro features that I’ve only been able to experience in the full version of the game. From Francis Hollow to Sake Speedway, the range of imitated tracks are fantastic, paying homage to their real-world counterparts through the features and corner names you’ll find as you wander around most corners. . The latter really helps inject the same subtle sense of humor into the game as previous versions of Funselektor, and the whole slate offers enough variety so things don’t get stale quickly.
The variety of riders and team personnel is equally great, with plenty of different combinations available to suit any build you might want. At the top you’ll see people who are really good at what they do, at the bottom you’ll see obscure or truly rubbish options that cost pennies, and in the middle you’ll find the real choose. A potential world-beater in the right situation, but flawed in other ways, including being too methodical to overtake quickly, often prone to being thrown into the wall, and just being a straight-up jerk that engineers couldn’t stand up to. They are your Heinz-Harald Frentzens, your Romain Grosjeans or your Jean Alesis.
That said, the main obstacle I encountered had to do with a strange quirk of the game driver market. As I mentioned during the preview, Golden Lap incorporated the scenario of a driver dying or being injured in a car accident (a frustrating reality at the time) into the gameplay. It’s generally handled with great poignancy, and the pacing of such tragedy as it unfolds feels natural, yet when dead or injured drivers are replaced, the game seems to be drawing from a pool separate from the main driver market. Some of the riders in this pool – I keep running into Lucas Verhoeven and Ethan Ward – are just as good as some of the top riders on the market, it’s just that they get plugged in a lot Get into the cars further back and be well ahead of where those cars are should run and finish.
This has a considerable impact on performance not just for a season but for an entire career, using one of the drivers will often result in the team achieving better results with that car than the others, thereby increasing the budget passed by its builder at the end of the year income earned. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if these drivers could always drag the laggards to the front or upper midfield and drive full-time for a better team next season, but so far I’ve only seen One of them popped up on the general market and I hired myself and then joined a pretty good AI team after I passed. Having two different career mode saves is extremely frustrating and immersion-breaking, so it definitely needs to be sorted given the purpose of the game.
When one of my drivers tragically died, those drivers were also not in the pool I was hired from. In fact, I can only afford a paid driver anyway because I’m in the early stages of my second season with Night – a small team that starts at the back of the grid – and spend the offseason Spending all my savings to completely transform the team into a competitive team through recruitment and car development was just adding insult to injury.
To be honest, though, that accident – because it took away a really good driver that I had hired and who had surged to the top of the championship in the first two races – was the exception. While it was often necessary to switch between seasons to jump to the front, in the career save where I spent the most time, I didn’t have much trouble staying on top once I got there.
While it might disrupt the relaxing minimalism that defines the Golden Circle, something a little more complicated in terms of how to manage the relationships between different team members – especially if you have two drivers vying for the title – might Produce worthy additions. After all, F1 in any era is equally defined by the handbags between the drivers and the people who help them race, both behind the scenes and on the track.
Beyond that, while the career mode is very strong and well-executed enough to warrant the game as its only mode, in addition to a quick match mode that lets you select a preset team and compete in a single event, I do think adding Something like a custom tournament mode would be a shrewd move in the future. Even if it just comes in the form of letting you play more God than competitor in career saves – pick each year’s track on the calendar and maybe get some other tools to help you design your own scenarios.
Overall, the launch version of Golden Lap was still a game that I briefly enjoyed earlier this year, even if there were some things that could have been better. It knows exactly what it wants to offer and does it in a very distinctive way that defines Funselektor’s games and helps them stand out from the racing crowd. Without making you smell the actual smell of gasoline, deafening the roar of the engine behind the wheel, or giving you a sip of sparkling wine on the podium, it manages to capture the spirit of what it depicts and, with a few tweaks, its pull Can be more irresistible.
Golden Lap will be released for PC on September 26th. This review was conducted on a PC and the code was provided by the publisher.
