Let me preface this review by telling you that I'm pretty serious when it comes to driving simulators, I'm the kind of guy that uses a high-quality wheel and pedal, turns off all the assists and gets into the game. If you're like me, you'll either love F1 2011 or become extremely frustrated by it. On the highest difficulty setting the game is extremely difficult and you will literally break a sweat from focus and effort after several laps. Building off what I already believed to be a very good game in F1 2010, Codemasters have truly upped the ante for 2011.  

In career mode, at least on the highest difficulty setting, you can only start your career with one of the bottom-bracket teams. This is clever since it forces you into F1 in a logical position, you can't just jump into Seb's seat at RBR and take over the world - they make you work for it. As you progress through your career you are given "rep points" based on your results and as your rep grows bigger you'll have offers on the table from higher ranked teams. The better the team the more rep points are required to before they look at you to fill one of their seats.

For the season opener in Australia I was blown away by how far off the pace I was, considering in F1 2010 on the same settings it was rare if I did not qualify in pole position. With DRS and KERS to play with in the new version I figured there was just some sort of a learning curve I had to get used to, it was until later races that I figured out what was going on. Since I was on a lower-end team at the beginning of the season our car simply wasn't up to pace with the higher budget teams, I experienced first hand the frustrations of an inferior car. This was a really nice touch. 

All of the other aspects of F1 that you've grown to love like the press conferences and media questions, but they've added a new section to the career portion by giving you a laptop. While having emails and race weekend information on a laptop sounds like a cool idea at first, you'll find it grows cumbersome rather quickly. But as far as the gameplay goes everything is as you'd expect and the graphics are noticeably better from the previous version and the sound, particularly with good headphones, is killer.

Although it's mostly smiles and good times, at the time of press my copy still freezes randomly for a few seconds mid-corner from time to time (Xbox version). Hopefully by the time you read this there will be an update patch available. Aside from that I don't have any complaints and would highly recommend F1 2011 to any race enthusiast. 

From: Codemasters, formula1-game.com

Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, Playstation3

Tested by Sean Klingelhoefer on Xbox 360