“We tried to make something we would enjoy,” New Star Games design director John Dennis said of New Star GP. New Star GP is an F1-style racing game from the studio behind games like Retro Bowl and New Star Manager. The early access version will be officially released on March 7th.
He went on to outline the studio’s original vision for its racing game, which was more towards the arcade end of the larger arcade simulation series that all modern racing games seem to belong to.
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While New Star GP had always been planned to include some more simulation-style aspects, such as tire wear, based on feedback a number of extra features have been added to the game that have a similar impact on the experience. Players who have been in early access and beta since last August. For example, a new difficulty setting “Pro Mode” has been added alongside the default difficulty setting at the start of the game to provide some extra realism and challenge for those who prefer it.
The central concept remains the same, though. If you choose the game’s career mode, you’ll race your way through five different decades of F1, from the 1980s to the 2020s, driving legitimately unique replica F1 cars and racing against legitimately unique replica F1 drivers. Inspired by racing reality, but also extremely customizable. You’ll be racing at a Silverstone circuit like Northampton, which has a unique style both in name and layout, while competing against the likes of Michael Schildhauer and Ayrton Serafino (no need to guess where these two were inspired).
Although each Grand Prix itself only has around six laps, each lasting about a minute, you’ll have to plan your strategy – which the developers say adds variety to the experience – and identify a pit stop or two in order to Spray champagne after the checkered flag flies. Add in factors like having to plan for possible rain showers or rougher track surfaces depending on where you are, and it doesn’t look like a case of just slamming the gas pedal to the metal and then bouncing away from the wall and/ or rivals, until you slide across the finish line in a car that’s supposed to be a metal (or carbon fiber) pancake.
That said, watch Dennis and New Star Community Manager Mark Baldwin race around tracks inspired by the likes of Spa and Monaco, deploying help at just the right moment as part of this hands-off preview Pusher and narrowly avoiding conflicts with AI drivers, New Star GP does look like it maintains the carefree, anarchic fun that many of us have traditionally looked for in arcade racing games. There are no stewards or penalties to stop you from knocking someone off the road or cutting corners, but damaging various parts of your car makes driving more difficult, so it might not be prudent to do a full-on Wreckfest or Burnout on someone’s ass of.
Considering that across the ten race weekends that make up a season in the game’s single-player career mode, you’ll be racing against the same people at each Grand Prix, and they’ll have different relationships with you depending on how well you perform. One point is especially true. Treat them. According to the developers, each driver is given a different personality that affects how quickly they get angry, as well as how fast they’ll go if you bump into them or talk trash in interviews or try to knock you off Get out.
Given my mixed experiences with similar mechanics in games like Grid Legends, I’m confident it will work as expected once I play the full game myself, but I’m at least as dissatisfied with another racer as Grid: Unabashed Fans – Stylish Features in New Star GP – Flashback/Rewind gives you the chance to sneakily pull your car out of an obstacle course you’ve just placed in a race. Back on track, you’ll upgrade your car parts and unlock perks, turning you and your team into a stronger racing partnership as the season progresses.
However, the developers say in the name of balance that your competitors will also level up, and if you win the last race by 10 seconds, their performance will improve even more. They strongly emphasize that this system ensures that matches don’t require any AI rubber-banding, which is often frowned upon by players and developers alike, and it would be nice if New Star actually managed to avoid it. Even if, as Dennis and Baldwin admit, you win by ten miles, the game’s short race length does help minimize the threat of boredom.
I’m interested in how I’ll feel about the mini warm-up races I do before each Grand Prix once I’ve mastered the full race. They’re things like time trials, elimination rounds, and one-on-one races – things you’ve probably encountered in many other racing games – although it seems likely they’re just optional activities to earn more money to buy parts , I hope they don’t stray to the other side of the equation and feel like a mandatory drag if you don’t want to level up at a snail’s pace.
If you don’t fancy racing against a royalty-free version of the grid alone against current or past F1 stars, New Star GP also offers a multiplayer mode called Championship, which, you guessed it, pits you against up to three F1 stars race together with your friends the old-fashioned split-screen way. Initially, this only spanned 17 pre-made racing championships, but this is another area of the game that’s changing due to Early Access feedback ahead of the full release.
New Star adds the ability to create your own custom championship, letting you scale everything from the era of the cars you’re racing, to the layout of the tracks you’re visiting, and even whether you want to drive around for up to 99 laps. The latter is probably not a good idea given the fuel and tire imbalance, so you’ll still need to pit every two or three laps – the developers aren’t quite sure how long the race will take, but they’re sure someone will try and find out Answer.
I’d love to see that person, whoever they end up being, go all out and have the race take place at one of the circuits like Brussels or Vienna, where the developers say the chance of rain is “about 30%” – with them Based on consistent real life locations – and has weather set to random. Truly embrace the madness.
Overall, I was curious to see what the full release version of New Star GP would look like after the preview, now that it’s passed the Early Access gauntlet. I think it’s getting into a genre that’s as unforgiving and hard to crack as any genre out there right now, especially now that so many people are calling for that kind of surrealism that your iRacings and your Assetto Corsas are really good at.
Still, I think if it learns EA’s lessons well, it has a chance to become a strong niche hit, even if cracking the mainstream still dominated by Forzas and Gran Turismos might be a bit of a stretch unless it has enough fun elements Games like Wreckfest and BeamNG.Drive draw crowds.It’s not an impossible dream, especially for something with a unique mission statement, as Dennis says: “You expect [modern] A motorsport game, but kind of like an arcade game with clothes on”.
Adding it to the cupboard behind the fire-breathing V12 monsters of the ’80s will be a difficult trophy, though.
New Star GP will be released via Steam on March 7 for Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC.