Golden Lap

While I firmly believe that the folk over at Frontier Developments have proven their skills time and time again with the F1 Manager series of games, there is no doubt that this simulation series can be a challenge to pick up and master. When you have tons of information, graphs, statistics, and so forth thrown at you, it can be a nightmare to determine what's relevant and useful and likewise how to utilise that to improve your gameplay. Clearly, Funselektor Labs also operates in a similar train of thought as the indie developer has now created a title that is probably best described as Mini F1 Manager.

Known as Golden Lap, this is effectively an F1 management simulator without all the fuss. It plays from a top down perspective that resembles a track layout and displays each car as a circled number as it zooms around the track. You have to determine tire strategies and perfect pit opportunities, navigate changing weather systems, you have to build out and employ the right folk to ensure you succeed and win races, and manage finances and complete sponsorship challenges to rake in cash necessary to upgrade your car in each season. Essentially, all the expected bells and whistles are here, but they're scaled back to the point where you can pretty much play this game with one hand off the wheel.

Now that's both a strength and a weakness, a double-edged sword if you will. On one hand, the simplicity makes Golden Lap an absolute delight to play. The minimalist setup takes the stress out of the simulation and also thanks to the scaled back design, you can actually progress through an entire season in around 90 minutes. For comparison, that could be the length of one race in an F1 Manager title. However, the rudimentary setup also means that Golden Lap lacks some of the complexity and detail that is really required to make it flow and play without hitches. The weather system, for starters, is horribly presented. You'll know when rain is forecast in a race/qualifying session so you can scheme accordingly, but what you can never really tell is how severe the rainfall will be. Yes, there is a meter that attempts to show this, but what you perceive as light rainfall where intermediate tires excel could in fact be a downpour where every other team switches to full wet tires leaving you in massive trouble. When you match this up with very basic race strategy systems that don't really allow you to control how a race develops, and a financial suite where money is pretty much always impossible to come by, you ultimately get an experience that starts to falter the closer you look at it.

But that's the thing, Golden Lap is at its best when you focus on the macro and not the micro. When you look at the race from a distance, simply look to control pit strategies, be hands-on with the tuning of the car during qualifying sessions, and spend money between races to improve your engine or chassis, when you focus on these parts and less on how the simulation elements really could do with refinement and added emphasis to present a more fulfilling strategic experience, this is when Golden Lap becomes an absolute joy to play.

I'd be remiss to talk a little about the presentation too, because Funselektor has really nailed the concept in this game. The minimalist design with vibrant colours, as we've seen formerly in the studio's last project Art of Rally, truly stands out. The audio and soundtrack perfectly befits the theme of an F1 experience, especially one that is set in the golden age of the sport in the 70s and 80s. The UI is incredibly refined and pleasing to look at, and frankly the overall whole reminds me a lot of Mini Metro and the brilliant aesthetic that Dinosaur Polo Club created for that title.

But again, Golden Lap isn't a flawless game. It has some really competent and excellent strengths that make it a blast to play, but at the same time, there are some areas that with a bit of improvement and refinement could have catapulted this game to extra heights. If the stress and time investment of F1 Manager games put you off of them but you still want the thrill of leading a motorsport team to victory by racing on familiar tracks with familiar sounding corners and landmarks and familiar teams and drivers then Golden Lap does enough right to make this a top choice.