I've been playing this game for a few weeks now, and I'm very glad I bought it. To start with: the driving physics. Unlike other people, I'm not going to claim to be a professional race car driver. I'll just say that I watch quite a few in-car camera videos of real F1 cars going around these exact same tracks, and you can learn the best lines, and the correct gear to be in while going around specific corners - and apply that knowledge directly to this game. I think that's pretty awesome. After doing numerous laps around a track in the game, I can watch an onboard camera view of a real F1 car going around the same track, and the performance of the cars seems extremely similar, if not downright identical. That's about as good as it gets, in my opinion. I use a Logitech Driving Force GT steering wheel to play this game, and it works perfectly. You also get the usual setup options, to change the amount of force feedback, etc. One thing I should point out: Formula 1 cars are extremely fast, and require 100% concentration for every single second of a race to drive successfully. When you go around one corner, the next one will be coming up in mere seconds. This is a challenging and somewhat demanding experience. It's not the same type of "fun" as other racing games offer, simply because of the awesome speed involved. If you're looking for a relaxing, casual driving experience, this ain't it.
As far as the design of the gameplay, you race around the exact same tracks, in the same order, as they were raced in this year's real-life Formula One season. You choose a team to start with, and drive the same car until you've achieved enough to get an offer from a different team. Throughout the season you can make small performance improvements to your car in the form of R&D objectives. Each race goes like this: you start with practice. These sessions last around an hour, letting you learn the track and get faster and faster on it. Then comes qualifying, where you try to do a few perfect laps and set a good time, which determines your place on the starting grid. And finally, the race itself. Due to all the buildup of practice and qualifying, the race itself seems like quite an exciting event. There are a lot of options here, you can have one practice session or three, and the length of the race can be set anywhere from a few laps all the way up to the length of the real-life race, usually between 60-70 laps.
The graphics are very good. Although they're probably not going to win any awards, they're not going to elicit too many complaints either. They have adequate detail to fit right into the current generation of games, but not really enough to make you say wow. Replays really look nice though, and seem to have a bit more detail and realism. For the most part the framerate is wonderfully smooth, though there is some slowdown in the second-to-last corner at Monaco. But it's the same every time you go around that corner, so it's predictable and doesn't affect gameplay.
There are plenty of options when it comes to choosing the difficulty that is right for you. You can set the overall difficulty of the game, which affects how much traction your car gets. Set it on hard and if you give it 1% too much throttle exiting a corner, you will spin out. Set it on medium, you'll get a much more forgiving experience. You can then choose the difficulty of the AI cars, which is basically how fast they go. And then you've got the usual driving aids, like traction control and anti-lock brakes, driving line, etc. you can also choose automatic or manual transmission - though at the higher difficulty levels I believe that it requires you to use manual transmission. You can set the damage simulation to realistic or cosmetic - real damage will cause your front wing to be broken off whenever you hit a wall, which greatly reduces the front end traction you get, requiring you to make a pit stop to have it replaced if you want to have any hope of being competitive. You can even choose realistic fuel simulation, which drastically lessens the braking ability of the car at the beginning of a race due to the weight of all the fuel, and as the race goes on and the fuel is used, traction gradually improves. So with a little fiddling around, you can customize your game experience exactly the way you want it.
The feeling of speed while driving the cars is pretty good as well. Especially on the Monaco track, which is absolutely packed full of tight corners and walls on either side. Watching all those walls and guardrails flash by you at 100+ mph, mere inches from the front wheels of your car...it's quite the experience. Which reminds me - you can perform some impressive crashes in the game. I managed to get my car to come to rest on its side once.
Overall, this game provides tons of options, gives you a genuine Formula 1 season, the physics are extremely realistic - if you're a fan of Formula 1 or racing in general, I'd highly recommend this.
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