Since I bought F1 three days ago I've been playing this game for about
20 hours in total. It is great!

Upon loading you get the choice between several languages including
english, french, german and italian. Everything in the game including
the commentaries exists in these languages. Then a very subtle and
stylish intro fades up which realy makes you eager to drive the car.

The interface is great and the lead guitar just oozes speed and formula
1.

The game itself is actually two different games, the arcade and the
grand prix, because of very differing handling and therefore driving.
In the arcade game you either race against time or tries to finnish in
front of another car (the so called ladder game). With each race the
time cut gets more difficult to reach or the other car just drives
better. In arcade mode the car handles a bit like ridge racer with
slightly more feeling to it. It's realy great fun. The panel graphics is
like most arcade racers.

But the most enjoyable of the two modes from my opinion is the grand
prix. Here the car behaves just like a real F1 car, skids in the grass
and everything. It's difficult in the beginning but very rewarding after
a bit of practice. This is one of the few games where it is actually fun
to try and qualify for a better grid position. The gran prix is
presented with other ingame panel graphics than the arcade, it's just
like watching F1 on the telly.

There is a wealth of options. One can choose between dry or random
weather (although it seems like it almost always rains), damage, tyre
wear, fuel (pitstops), race length, number of races, random course, cd
music or native commentary, detailed volume control, easy/normal/hard,
mono/stereo/q-sound/surround sound, finetuning of the screens placement,
panel brightness etc.

Then there is the two-player option. It doesn't feature split screen,
but if you have two tv's and two playstation you can link up. It's GREAT
fun! There is the option to just play one on one or with the whole
field. If you play against an equal adversary there are some great
battles to be faught.

Now the graphics... THEY ARE SUPERB! It's very fluent (about 25-30 fps)
with great detail (I've been to Monaco a couple of times and could
recognize everything, well almost). There are lots of very detailed cars
on the course with a maximum of 26 and they all drive intelligent. I've
read somewhere that they actually had to cut down on detail, that ain't
noticable. If you wheel spin you leave a trail of smoke and skidmarks on
the road. The skidmarks disapears after a while (probably because of the
Playstations memory constraints), but they look great. Sparkles fly from
your car and it's frontwing and spoiler can be cut off if damaged. The
scenery is great with small cottages, big buildings, bridges, bumps on
the city courses, hills and some nice trees. As I've already commented,
the frontend graphics are great too. There are five different racing
views to choose between plus a tv camera.

The sound is great. It's the best commentary I've heard in a
computergame and the motor noise actually sounds like a Formula 1
engine. There is nothing like when you drive and you begin to hear the
crowd roar in the distance, great ambient sounds. The music is great.
Well... everything about this game is great.

What have I forgotten... Oh yeah... The replay feature. You can watch
the entire race from any car using either the tv camera or the car view.
You can save your default settings which automatically will be loaded if
a memory card is present on startup, and ofcourse you can save between
races in the gran prix.

This is without a doubt the best game for the playstation and probably
the best racing game ever for the home. Buy it now. What could be
improved? Well, there could be visible damage on the car like scratches
and such. In a two-player game you can't return to the front end to
change settings without having to link up again. Some sort of reward for
winning the championship other than a text screen would be nice. But
these are just superficious lackings and they should not distort the
impression that this is one hell of a game.

*****
five out of five stars

- Casper Bram, 16th of september 1996.