IndyCar. That’s what you get when you cross Formula One with crazy Americans, loads of crashes, and oval tracks that just go around and around…. (and around). Codemasters attempted to bring this strangely entrancing sport to the PS2 last year with IndyCar Series and now have another go with this “2005” edition, this time adding online racing to the mix.
Right from the beginning, you can tell that some effort has been made to create the authentic Indycar look. Official licenses have been obtained to use the right names and official tracks of the Indycar series (the IRL). Then again, you could say Simon Cowell was an indycar driver, and I wouldn’t know the difference, so the extra effort seemed a little wasted on me, and the majority of Britain, who most probably haven’t even seen an Indy race, let alone know the drivers names!
This creates a problem, as if you haven’t seen an Indy race, you don’t know what makes the races (it certainly isn’t the track variation), or how to win properly. This game prides itself on two things: its attention to detail, and its harder-than-asphalt gameplay. Both of these points make the game pretty frustrating to newcomers to this type of game, or to racing games in general. Let’s start by describing an Indy race, to see if it makes things any clearer: You race with 32 other cars (after qualifying) around a circuit that is basically an oval, or a modified oval (anti-clockwise to make a lap comprising of all left-turns) for about 200 laps. Since very little driving skill is required, other characteristics are brought into play. This includes things such as balancing your car’s fuel levels and pit stops, tyre temperature, downforce, air resistance etc. There are hundreds of such small factors that can make your car go 1/100th of a second faster than the 2nd place car, or that can cost you the pole…
Essentially, Indy racing (and Indycar series 2005) is all about tinkering with your car to make it perfect, and adapting it to different situations, over and above actually driving it. Driving skill is of course necessary to get the car to the end of the race, but with a poor setup and strategy you won’t qualify well, won’t be competitive in the race and won’t enjoy the experience much.
Now, if you’re a newcomer to this kind of thing, or didn’t like the garage section of Gran Turismo, then you can always try the easy option. This leaves out the tough stuff like fuel management, tyre pressures, and aerodynamics - your car is already tuned, you just need to pick a pretty one, and try to get as far ahead as possible. This is where the game’s biggest problem arises, and a catch-22 appears. The actual prospect of driving around an oval for 200 laps isn’t particularly thrilling, even if you can tone it down to half and quarter distance, even for Indy fans, it’s still pretty dull. The one aspect that makes Nascar games pretty damn fun - the intense pile-ups, are removed on easy mode, as no-one can take any damage, simplifying the game to a simple one-way oval track to boredom. It’s not even as if the AI is forgiving on easy mode either.
Move things up to the normal and hard modes, and the various tinkering options are opened, as well as extreme damage and a really sensitive handling mode. This is where the catch-22 situation arises: the game, without the
damage, extreme handling and endless tuning is shallow and boring. With these options, the game is hideously confusing and tough. You could be lost in the pits for an hour, changing wheel cambers or tyre pressures (because over-inflated tyres cause uneven weight distribution – and that’s bad), only to find you haven’t done any of it right anyway. If you, by some crazy freak of chance, manage to tune your car properly, you face more problems. Firstly, your car’s handling changes as the race goes on, because of warmer tyres, lower weight due to a lighter fuel tank etc, so you’ll have to keep tinkering to keep things rosy. Get this right, and you can still run into the car next to you a tiny bit, and there goes a wheel, and your chances of getting a decent league position.
The other sections of the game are very good, with some quality graphics, handling 33 cars speeding away down the main straight with very little popup pretty smoothly. Cars create sparks, body parts fly off on impact, and there’s a lovely heat haze effect at low speeds, but none of it exactly puts you in awe. The sound is pretty immersive, capturing the feeling of being in a high-speed race well. The music borders on cheesy, with swing guitar-riffed tracks that could be straight from Days of Thunder (a cheesy Tom Cruise movie about stock car racing).
Another failing of the game is the online mode. Like most non-mainstream online games, the problem with including online modes is that there might not be enough people playing to justify buying it for that very purpose. I sat with the only created room in the server for twenty minutes, and not a single soul joined, let alone the maximum of eight. This made this mode pretty hard to test if it was any good or not, but without anyone else to play it with, it’s quite pointless anyway. The game is clearly aimed at the US, and clearly doesn’t have the same appeal in Europe.
IndyCar Series 2005 is a niche game, for what is admittedly to me, a boring form of motorsport. Other “boring” sports, such as Golf, Tennis, and even Cricket, have been made not only entertaining, but accessible and user-friendly to the mainstream gaming audience. There’s plenty to keep the fans of Indy racing occupied with a massively challenging career mode, this is one of the most authentic and painstakingly-developed racing games I’ve seen in ages. But for those people who don’t know (or care) that driving the racing line aids grip (because the burnt rubber fills in the holes and imperfections in the road), the game can end up feeling more like Championship Manager than Gran Turismo. A great game for those who have the time and dedication to appreciate it, but mainstream racers and arcade-action junkies should do a handbrake turn and head the other way.
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