F1 2020 Review | My Team Adds to a Winning Formula.

It’s lights out and away we go! Formula 1 fans may have waited a long time for the 2020 season to start, but now it’s finally underway and Codemasters dropped their latest title in the long-running F1 game series just in time to race along with it. Is this year’s game worth your time? Let’s find out in this busy gamer’s review of F1 2020.

Welcome back to No Time Gamer. If you’re new here, hit subscribe to get more reviews and content for busy gamers to make sure your gaming sessions are time well spent. Of course we have come to expect a new F1 title every year, and usually we only have minor changes from the previous year’s title to look forward to.

But this year Codemasters has delivered an all-new game mode for its fans: My Team. This is not your average career mode that we’ve seen in previous titles. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to start a brand new F1 team from the ground up? This year’s game gives you the chance to find out by becoming the 11th team on the grid as an owner/driver.

You’ll start out by creating your own character to your liking, with the ability to choose everything from physical appearance to a racing suit and helmet, to choosing a podium celebration. From there, you get to make the all-important decision of naming your team, and choosing sponsorship contracts to give you some funds.

Each sponsor has its own pros and cons based upon the signing bonus they’ll give you as well as their expectations of you throughout your contract. After you’ve chosen your sponsor, you’ll get to make a few other major decisions including choosing your engine supplier, your teammate, and your team’s branding and livery.

These decisions can greatly affect how your team operates throughout your first season, so choose wisely. Once you’ve made your choices, the fun really begins. This mode is quite immersive, in that you get to participate in a longform interview before the season starts, which actually ends up having some effects on your team’s R&D departments based on your answers.

You even get to experience your team’s car reveal before you get out on the track for the first time. As always, you have to manage R&D for your car as the season progresses, but in this game mode there’s more to that than picking upgrades from the R&D tree.

You can spend money on departmental upgrades to increase a department’s efficiency to decrease the cost of upgrades and the time each part takes to build, along with things like improvements to quality control, department capacity, and weekly resource point generation.

This may sound like a lot to do and scare away the busy gamer, but it doesn't have to take a lot of time if you don't want it to. You can adjust the length of each Grand Prix weekend throughout the season. So if you only have an hour or so to play, just shorten the current weekend and you'll be through practice and qualifying in no time, and you'll be able to complete a 25% race in less than a half hour.

If you somehow cleared your schedule for 3 or 4 hours, bump the weekend up to full length to enjoy lots of practice time, 3 full qualifying sessions and a full length race. The time it takes to do a weekend is entirely up to you. Of course, you can always do a normal career mode, individual Grand Prix weekends, or race online in your favorite established car on the grid if starting from nothing doesn't sound like your thing.

We didn't talk much about the rest of the game, because frankly aside from My Team mode and the addition of the exciting new tracks in Vietnam and The Netherlands added to the calendar, it's not much different from F1 2019...and that’s a good thing. It’s still a great racer that straddles the line between sim and arcade play styles.

The driving is highly competitive as you’d come to expect from these ultra-modern, high-tech open wheel cars. You'll still get the stunning graphics and solid driving dynamics that we've experienced in past titles, with assists available to customize the game to your liking and experience level.

And speaking of experience, if you’ve never played a title in the series before, we think that F1 2020 is a perfect chance to jump into the cockpit and start ripping around tracks from all over the world. The performance of the cars will quickly bring a smile to your face.