Recent reviews by Rau the Legendary

This game really makes me wish there was more competition on the market for motorsport managers. I could take my review for the 2022 version and copy paste most of it. It's once again a very basic simulation game that almost feels on-rails. You will always make forward progress and besides overspending there's basically nothing you can truly do wrong. You will have seen the entire gameplay loop and all of its depth within an hour.

It lacks the elements that make F1 strategy calls actually interesting in real-life. The data gathering, the unpredictable nature of tyres and weather/track conditions, figuring out what's stronger between track position or tyre advantage, finding a balance between qualifying and race setups, dealing with cars that are difficult to handle, upgrades that end up failing, driver mentality, etc,

All of it is either non-existent or represented in such a basic manner that it loses all its magic. Even when there are informed decisions to be made the UI remains cumbersome as ever. On top of that there are the numerous bugs for many core features that will affect literally everyone's campaign, which once again clearly shows that they pushed the game out too early. I'm sure Frontier will fix the worst of it as they did with previous releases, but man.. I just want this game to be better. I do like the addition of create-a-team. I was hoping for that one since the 2022 version.

At the end of the day, once they fix some of the worst bugs, it'll be a decent casual F1 manager. Pretty but sorely lacking in depth, which I'm afraid is how you can describe most of Frontier's work

Honestly, this game feels like an early beta. It's probably the best looking management game ever and it nails the look and feel of an F1 race, but that's also literally the only positive. The simulation is extremely simplistic/subpar and completely misses the mark on everything that makes F1 strategy interesting. It's hard to imagine that anyone who actually watches F1 thought this game was fine in its current state.

This is not really the place to do a super deep dive on everything that's wrong, but here's a sum-up:

• Tyre strategy is meaningless. There's not enough difference between compounds for it to matter so you end up doing the same thing every race.
  
• The tyre models in general are just the most basic implementation you could think of. Tyres don't need different treatment or warm-up laps, they degrade in the most linear and predictable way possible. Even the temperatures are meaningless. Wet weather tyres also behave very unrealistically.
  
• The AI seems as basic as it gets. They stick to one strategy and never react to what others are doing.
  
• DRS is too effective and every race ends up being a bunch of separate DRS trains. Since the tyre strategy is irrelevant this means all you're doing during a race is energy/fuel deployment management to make sure your driver gets and stays within DRS. It gives you too much free lap time.
  
• Crashes/mistakes often have unrealistic outcomes.
  
• There's no safety car unlapping.
  
• Cars on outlaps completely ignore cars currently on a qualifying run, which will lead to qualifying runs being ruined.
  
• Set-ups are a slow, pointless and repetitive mini-game. Even going for literally the worst possible setup doesn't make much of a difference. You can't choose to focus more on qualifying or the race. There's no need to do different free practice runs for qualifying and race simulations. Free practice is literally a waste of time, so you end up just simulating it or suffering through it on 16x speed.
  
• The team management part of the game is very simplistic and doesn't offer much in the way of choice or consequences. You get enough money that you can slowly but surely upgrade whatever you want and there's no outcome where you don't outpace the opponents in car development. There's zero sponsorship management besides setting performance goals. Driver management is as basic as it gets.
  
• There's way more than this, but this is already getting too long

I'm 100% the target audience for an F1 manager game. Seriously, I'm the biggest target imaginable. I really want to like it, but this game's foundation couldn't be much worse. They've basically failed in implementing any of the interesting fundamental aspects of F1. Right now I think it's tough to even call this a management or strategy game. It's more comparable to a clicker/idle game considering how little thought is involved. Anything you do will lead to forward progress.

Given the size and number of issues and the fact that this will be a yearly franchise from now on, it seems unrealistic to expect any meaningful patches. They'll probably just move on right to next years iteration. I hope that one's considerably better because this one isn't worth the time or money. I'll update the review if they do make meaningful changes.

Elden Ring has left me feeling quite conflicted. The game makes a great first impression, has awesome moments, so much content and is, at times, even mind-blowing. I've never wanted to play a From game so thoroughly before. Which is why it's strange that towards the end I simply wanted to get this thing over with. The bosses are already less memorable than the ones I faced in Bloodborne years ago and despite all the Ubisoft jokes, this game also suffers from open world fatigue. Add the fact that most of the game's faults only really come to light later on and Elden Ring ends up feeling like a game that is in many ways unbalanced.

Let's start with the elephant in the room, the open world. Breath of the Wild still has unrivalled freedom of movement, RDR 2's open world still feels the most alive, and, if you count it, Outer Wilds still has the best exploration ever seen, but content-wise Elden Ring has the best open world ever created and it's not even close. While not perfect, it manages to fill the map up with mostly rewarding and meaningful content without neglecting the more traditional large and intricate areas you know and love from the Souls games. Pretty much every corner of the open world has something to find and rarely are you not rewarded for exploring every nook and cranny, which is something you can't say for any other game in the genre. It also makes this the least intimidating Soulsborne game so far. I've had so many moments in these games where the relentless stressful nature of the areas would make the idea of tackling a new area extremely unappealing. Elden Ring has a lot more potential downtime because you can take the game at your own pace. It's fully up to you whether you want to go through the legacy dungeons straight away or if you want to do something else. Having other areas to explore that haven't been designed by Kevin McCallister makes the game less stressful in general.

The open world is never overwhelming with the amount of content it throws at you thanks to the brilliant map design. Seriously, the map is so clever in its simplicity. It's very easy to identify where the points of interests are going to be without having the game just throw icons at you. There have been multiple times where I've been incredibly impressed by both the size and the visual design of new areas I discovered. And every time you think you've seen it all, the game throws another new area at you. While this has a tremendous wow factor, it's also one of Elden Ring's weaknesses.

It's been a common complaint within the genre and Elden Ring too suffers from simply being too damn big. Especially later on there's quite a bit of repetition affecting the dungeons and enemy variety. Obviously, repetition is an unavoidable factor in open world games. I still think this game hits the balance between amount of content, repetition and rewards the best out of any open world game I've played, but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. In a franchise that's all about 'less is more', Elden Ring could've used less.

That's not the only classic open world issue that this game runs into. It's incredibly easy to overlevel yourself for areas. If you're the type of person that likes to mostly or fully explore an area before moving on, you are almost certainly going to end up grossly overleveled for some areas. The famously vague storytelling and quests also suffer from the open world switch. There are a good number of interesting characters, which makes it all the more disappointing that it can be so hard to follow their storylines. Good luck remembering someone's deal when you meet them again twenty hours of gameplay later. Keeping a notepad file open and recording everything you hear is almost a requirement unless you'd rather risk spoiling yourself on a wiki.

By far my biggest issue with Elden Ring is the boss design and general balance. From the middle of the game onwards, bosses just start becoming less and less fun. They don't feel like a fair interesting challenge. By that I don't mean that they are too difficult. In fact, there's a bunch of ways to almost trivialize the entire game. The problem is that bosses just seem to have all the tools. Every single one of them went to their local hardware store and cleared the entire inventory. Multiple fast combos they can cancel out of? Yup. Area of effect attacks? Sure. Ranged attacks? Duh. Multiple different hard hitting delayed attacks to throw your timing off? Ugh, yes. Tons of jumping around? Yep, and the camera is awful at dealing with it too. A bunch of duo fights with bosses that clearly were not designed to be fought together? Uh huh. Do they combine all of these and also have the bosses read your inputs, giving you barely any windows of opportunity? Of course they did. The bosses feel overtuned and lack unique identities. However, like I mentioned before, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily too difficult, just that they aren't fun or interesting. When it comes to difficulty, the biggest problem seems to be how unbalanced the tools are that the player has. Certain playstyles and weapons are considerably worse than others. That's not new for Souls games and generally not that big a deal in PvE-centric games, but the issue is that it's worse than usual and further fuelled by the boss designs.

Souls games have always had options to make fights more doable. All the twelve-year-old gatekeepers will gladly remind you of that fact. One aspect of the games is making up your own guideline, your own restrictions to create a fun challenge. For some people that means zero restrictions, for some it means no summons, and for a few special someones that means being stark naked, using a Guitar Hero controller, never leveling, being legally blind and playing while skydiving above an active volcano. It's all about finding your sweet spot. In Elden Ring however, it's less finetuning and more like a volume knob that can only switch between heavy metal concert and library. It's so difficult to turn these bosses into a fun challenge instead of overly frustrating or overly easy. Of course, this is going to be highly subjective and will probably make a bunch of the earlier mentioned gatekeepers go, "git gud". But VERY few of the bosses in this game felt like an Orphan of Kos. Really tough, but still a fun challenge twenty attempts in. At no point does that boss feel impossible and you'll likely feel at least some form of progress in each attempt. In this game I've had very few bosses take anywhere near that many attempts and yet I thought they were some of the most frustrating and poorly designed bosses I've seen in any From game to date. It feels more reactive and less about learning because of the increased amount of randomness. Even winning often doesn't feel good because it sometimes just comes down to the AI having a random temporary loss of IQ, leading to an easy fight just because they suddenly refused to use their strongest move. The fair, tough, but fun sweet spot seems hard to reach.

On top of that there's the ongoing technical issues that cause stuttering and even freezing or crashes. The UI could also use some quality-of-life changes but is generally decent enough. All in all, I think Elden Ring could have been a considerably better game than it is currently, but despite the myriad of complaints I have, it’s still a good to great game. The first half was really impressive. The attention to detail and amount of content is insane. It will be one of the best examples for open worlds going forward. The traditionally strong mysterious worldbuilding is still there, with the only possible complaint being that it's maybe a bit too traditional. Above all, Elden Ring feels different. It doesn't feel like just another game. It's an experience, and as mentioned before, at times it's a mind-blowing one. For me that’s enough to recommend it without reservation, but not enough to remove that conflicted feeling.

Fixes a lot of the issues from the previous game while introducing some new ones. Feels very iterative, but still a great title if you liked the previous one or turn based strategy in general. Mod support makes soldier customization more fun and allows for cool gameplay tweaks.