New Star GP review: Putting the fun back in F1

If, right now, you ask a long-time F1 fan what keeps them tuning in to watch cars go round and round while a paddock full of very smart engineers and some of the most dodgy rich people the world has to offer look on, they’ll all probably give different answers.

Some’ll say it’s the drama, some’ll say it’s impressive tech being pushed to the limit, some’ll say they like seeing Charles Leclerc’s pretty face. All of these reasons are equally valid, but, following an opening race to the 2024 season that certainly tested my resolve to tune in again this week - I don’t think many of the answers you got would directly speak to what should be the simple reason any of us watch sports. Above all else, it’s supposed to be fun.

New Star GP, the latest release from the studio behind Retro Bowl and New Star Manager, is exactly that. It’s straight-up fun. Coming out of a recent preview of the game, I honestly wasn’t sure whether it would be, given that it was coming out of early access stocked with a mixture of arcadey and sim-style elements that seemed like they might lead it to struggle to properly deliver enough of either vision.

The reality is that, while I think anyone who comes into it expecting a cartoony version of iRacing will end up disappointed, New Star GP, generally speaking, does a great job of incorporating just enough arcade and sim at any moment to keep you engaged no matter what you’re after. The main place it does this is in its meaty career mode, which is definitely the game’s main selling point right now and sees you race through five different decades of F1 history - from the 1980s to the present day.

Before you take to parody versions of F1 tracks for five ten race-long seasons that’ll pit you against a gaggle of Bobson Dugnutt-level parody versions of famous drivers, you’ll choose between two difficulty settings - normal and pro. Normal’s the one you’ll probably want to go with first unless you want to jump right in at the deep end, and I’m glad to report that it’s certainly no walk - well, drive - in the park.

While I managed to absolutely trounce the competition right out of the box in the 80s, once we got into the 90s and 2000s, seasons two and three respectively, you could tell the game had adjusted to match my skill level, just as New Star Games had suggested it would.

As things kicked on into the 2010s and 2020s, it only became more evident that everything from the speed at which AI drivers were upgrading their cars to match or surpass mine to the amount that sim-style features like tyre and mechanical part wear were having on the action was being regularly updated to keep things within a challenge Goldilocks zone. In addition to making sure I wasn’t running away with everything in a manner that could easily get boring fast, this ensured that I had to spend plenty of time mastering and playing around with the array of means of seeking an advantage that the game gives you.

Deciding how many times to stop is key to winning in these later stages, especially if you’re a track that suits a one stopper, though the increased prevalence of weather that changes mid-race and the need to make sure certain parts wouldn’t blow up on the last lap forced me to become equally deft at last minute splash and dashes. I’m not sure if I ended up having brakes and gearboxes especially start giving up on me pretty much every race from wear and tear alone was solely a product of my particularly erratic and lead footed driving style, but let’s face it, that’s probably what happened.

Thankfully, a couple of the various perks you unlock for the three staff members that make up your racing team as you progress through each season are specifically designed to help you offset the undue stress you might put on your poor car by trying to be the last of the late breakers. Though, as the devs had outlined at the preview, the loadout of perks and sponsors you take into each GP and warm-up event is something you do end up tweaking pretty regularly.

I found there were some of these, such as the ones that let you slipstream other cars and reward you with extra Bux (that’s New Star GP’s main currency), which I ended up sticking with for a while. Others, like those that help speed up pit stops by making things like repairs and tyre switches faster, or those that make being caught on the wrong tyre for the weather conditions less of a penalty, that were key to have for certain races. For title deciders, licensing a tech pack from another team was a necessary ace, alongside some carefully selected perks and fully-upgraded car.

Add the fact that your pretty much all of your perk and upgrade progress resets every time the calendar flicks over to a new decade to the fact you have to choose between two perks every time you earn a new one, and there’s plenty going on to keep things fresh and engaging - if at times a little grindy.

Though, despite all of this stuff designed to make sure the game requires you to do a good amount of thinking - a lot of which was seemingly dialled up or added to as a result of early access feedback - New Star GP does well not to lose the sense of fun that’s key to its arcadier elements very often. It’s a game that’s about making not quite Max Verstappen so angry that steam literally starts coming out of his ears through his helmet because you’ve run into him or teased him in an interview, and it never forgets that.

That said, as amusing as these little rivalries each decade are, I do think it’d have been better not to limit specific drives to only appearing in one season. As well as allowing some beefs to evolve over a longer period of time, making them a bit more meaningful, this would have avoided the problem of having the 2010s season arrive and the grid being almost utterly devoid of stars - because Lewis Hamilton, Seb Vettel, and Fernando Alonso’s equivalents were all in the 2000s.

Now, I’ve left New Star GP’s other game mode, Championship, until last, because I think playing it offers a pretty good picture of the entire experience. There’s a decent amount of customisation on offer if you want it. Pretty much all of the shortened parodies of real world tracks you’ll be racing on are enjoyable to race around - especially the ones that have a plenty of rollercoaster-esque elevation changes. There’ll be some mayhem if you fancy causing it, even if only having ten cars on track at a time does stop things from getting as crazy as you might hope.

If you’re playing split screen, your mates will be able to get into it easily and probably have a good time, to the extent you might find yourself feeling like if the game had an online mode, that’d arguably give it a better shot than it might currently have at becoming a properly ideal alternative to its established competition.

It feels like it’s still got some room to grow in certain places in order to reach its full potential, but, unlike real world F1 in 2024, it’s pretty damn fun.

The full release of New Star GP comes to PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PlayStation consoles on March 7. This review was conducted on PC with a code provided by the publisher.