Formula One. Up until recently, it’s been a sport that contains very few true competitors - watching the same cars win every race with no contest (usually a red one, with Michael Schumacher driving it). Luckily, Max Moseley and the FIA thought to try and make it interesting, putting in some new rules to spice things up. The new Formula one game for this year also attempts a new makeover, trying to finally hit the mark that has been missed by so many other F1 titles - authenticity without being so damn boring - oh well, at least they tried.

From the start, you’re given a list of options that seem to be a little more than just modes, but have their individual difficulty levels as well, each catering for a different type of gamer. You can either choose Arcade, Simulation or Career mode.

Anyway, from the arcade mode, you can race in a single race, or in the career mode. This is essentially the same as the others, but with the easier options, i.e. ABS, no damage, no fuel control and none of that fancy-pants tweaking, leaving just the race to concentrate on. This game mode caters for the action junkie; who can’t be arsed with tweaking the front and rear wings to get optimum downforce, or getting the wheel cambers right, they just want to get on the track and get down to business.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you feel like you live and breathe F1, and fancy yourself as a virtual Jenson Button, then the insanely hard, anal-retentive attention to detail career mode is definitely your thing. You start off as a nobody, with your choice of body and helmet, and a pocketful of dreams. You then have the chance to run trial laps for scouts of racing teams. Do well, and you start at the bottom of the rung, as a test driver for Minardi, training for a year while the computer plays out the Grand Prix season for you, and you play with yourself, eventually getting a job as a second driver for the team. Do badly, and you eventually get offered a job at Minardi, as a test driver, and you spend the whole season just trying to get the required lap time on one of the seriously annoyingly hard challenges. Then you realise you’re not cut out for this not-allowed-to-race-until-you-train-loads malarkey, and head for the Simulation mode.

As for the scenery, and all things graphical, it definitely shines with extra polish. The cars are beautifully modelled, and are lovely to watch fly past you lap after lap after lap…. The tracks themselves also seem to have this crisp sheen about them, the road looking convincing when you’re up close and personal, as do the gravel traps and blurry barriers. The weather effects aren’t as impressive, though. The sunny weather looks quite pleasant, with the road giving off a little glare when the Sun’s beating down on it, but get some cloudy skies on, and it seems to deteriorate to the level of the rest of the game - rather dull and uninteresting.

If you’d noticed the Network Play logo on the box and thought that might be its saviour, then think again; F1 ‘04’s network play is even duller, and even less interesting than the offline game. There’s no head to head racing as such, you just choose a location, join a lobby and race against other player’s ghosts – you can communicate via text but there’s no voice communication – it’s all so remote, impersonal and unsatisfying that even if you are in a room with people you know it’s a wholly unsatisfactory experience – if this is the best they could manage for an online mode you wonder why they bothered at all.