Motorsport Manager: Full game review

Is this the game motorsport fans have been waiting for? That's what we asked back in May, after getting a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the soon-to-be-released Motorsport Manager.

Since the new SEGA-backed title, developed by Playsport Games, was launched a few months ago it has become a highly-anticipated addition to the motorsport gaming market.

We were certainly excited by it, and that was only after speaking to those involved, and getting a small glimpse into the gameplay.

It's moved on a lot since then - and the release of what could be termed a beta version only excited us more.

And since we've got our hands on it, we've edged closer to an answer to the question at the top.

THE DRIVERS

Our career in charge of Archer BMR kicked off in the European Racing Series. This is the third tier, one that has been added since the game launched in its initial guise, and sits below the Asia-Pacific Supercup and the headline World Motorsport Championship.

One of the key parts of being in charge of a team is managing the star personnel within. Individual traits and the strength and size of drivers egos can combine to make life incredibly tough for the person at the top.

This is something that Motorsport Manager tries to capture.

While there are the traditional attribute ratings - for example braking, adaptability and consistency - the characters also have their own personalities.

Take our short career so far. The established driver in the team, 34-year-old Alex Rogers, does fun runs (despite having poor fitness - a bit odd) off-track . So his marketability goes up, because he's a charitable individual seen out in the public domain, which is a benefit to the team.

Conversely, the 22-year-old Mohamed El Sadat is something of a hothead. Reasonably quick on track but quicker on the draw off it, in a bid to assert his dominance over a situation.

Upon arriving at Archer BMR, we were greeted with an email from El Sadat that bordered on the aggressive - a demand for preferential treatment over Rogers, despite both having equal-status contracts. Two races into the season, he then hit out at Aurelie Dembele, a female rival who had prevented a team one-two in Doha by beating El Sadat to second.

In that rant, he declared he'd never drive in the same team as her.

Useful information for a team boss already considering his line-up for next season and in need of an experienced, assured replacement for the ageing Rogers...

Anyway, the point is that's a deliberate, added layer of detail that enhances the user experience. Games like this have to feel like there's more variety away from the races because there will come a point where that feels 'stale', because it's the same few parameters to play within at any one time.

There's a reserve-driver option in the game as well, while a scouting facility allows you to keep detailed tabs on those competing in your championship or the other two categories. Hiring and firing comes at a cost, and because there are so many different ways to compare drivers off-track, it's actually quite a good representation of the thought process required in reality.

Competing in the ERS is almost homage to the F1/GP2/GP3 system, but with much greater perks and freedom. So the second and third tiers exist to create and develop the team, rather than purely act as a feeder series for drivers - and both have handsome financial reward packages.

Taking the ERS car, there is one spec part at the start of our game and that's the front wing. But beyond that there is significant freedom - the engine, gearbox, brakes, suspension and rear wing can all be updated.

That means prioritising development of parts from both a financial point of view - budget management is everything in this game - and a time point of view. There are no magic fixes in Motorsport Manager; parts take several weeks to come together. And that is frustrating - not in a 'Well, this is underwhelming and dull' way, more of a 'But El Sadat is crap on the brakes and we've got a street track coming up...'

Here's one of the best elements of the game in our perspective. When you choose to design a new part, there are different ways you can improve it - split between reliability and performance. But there are also options to upgrade it with varying risks of a rule break.

'You can cheat?'

Maybe you can look at it like that. We preferred to see it as an opportunity to build a car that was not illegal.

We failed.

As mentioned just before, El Sadat is not strong on the brakes. So one of the first upgrades was to improve that area of the car. There was a solution that provided a very low risk of a rule break, but yielded great gains in performance (if not reliability).

We had it completed in time for the first race and hopes were high.

A terrible misreading of the weather conditions left the team locking out the last row of the grid in qualifying, and a similar error in the race (having risen through the order strongly) consigned both (lapped) drivers to 19th and 20th.

And then El Sadat was thrown out of the results after a post-race scrutineering check found his car to be illegal.

Lesson learned. We've not tried to push that envelope since. But the temptation is always there every time something requires an upgrade...

Of course, key to the ability to improve the performance of the car is the facilities a team has at its disposal.

Within your headquarters on Motorsport Manager, there is the factory and the design centre. Each starts at a base level and then you need to upgrade both in order to develop the rest of your headquarters.

This was considered priority number one for us, above re-evaluating the staff. Now, a few months into the season, Archer BMR has a basic ride-handling development centre and a brakes-research facility. And yes, the latter came about as a result of the illegal brakes. Let it go...

What these upgrades do is enhance the team's collective part knowledge - for us, brakes and suspension are now particularly strong. And that means access to better upgrades (and more options) when it comes to designing a new part.

Of course, each development comes at a cost - and each following development comes at a greater cost. Given part of your budget management is putting money aside for next year's car, hitting race targets is absolutely crucial.

Our strategy was to maximise sponsorship from companies willing to pay more up front, in order to fund an aggressive development strategy early on. This, the theory went, would then allow us to plump for sponsors with higher expectations when it comes to taking a sponsor to each race.

This is a genuine feature - you choose which sponsor you want, and in return you get a windfall if you meet the expectation. The higher the expectation, the bigger the return.

But when qualifying and race expectations have been missed, the team has made a small loss from the event. That briefly halts the development strategy, and a few more similar results would mean the facilities may not be improved before the end of the season.

What we can do in the interim is allocate our staff across performance and reliability to improve our existing parts. Over a race weekend there is significant part degradation (at least the way I play) and this takes time to rectify post-event. While this is going on, work on the car has to wait. It usually takes a few days, but it's precious time lost if you're not maintaining the car well.

Like the drivers, your staffers have different attributes. The game has a simple staffing system, limiting you to a chief designer and a race mechanic for each. This is something that could be expanded in future editions of the game, or upgrades further down the line.

The chief designer's attributes are focused around technical knowledge - all the parts of the car. The mechanics are rated on concentration, skill at pitstops, leadership and their influence on performance areas such as reliability, speed and performance.

These mechanics build a rapport with each driver and the stronger that relationship becomes, the more 'benefits' it unlocks. For example, Rogers has good chemistry with his engineer Steve Thomas, who has a high pitstop rating. The result is being able to take more risks at pitstops with that car, shaving a couple of seconds off each time with a smaller chance of things going wrong.

You can scout staff just as you can drivers, and swap your existing mechanics between your drivers.

It's quite easy to get up to speed with how the game works in a race scenario, which is important. If it were too daunting, it would be a turn-off.

We opted for the medium option in terms of race length - so the races have so far been between 13 and 18 laps long. And there are three speeds to play at, so they normally last between five and 10 minutes.

One thing that has proven difficult has been the short practice sessions, which usually only lend themselves to one run, two laps maximum. But that's the rule of the series - and we'll get to something interesting about that in a little while - and while it makes it difficult to work out if the set-up choice you've gone for has worked, you have to roll with it.

There is a decent amount to play with on the set-up front, from the more standard changes like front and rear wing angle to suspension stiffness and camber. For those who are less mechanically minded, there's a guidance bar that moves as you make changes to indicate how you're affecting straightline speed, acceleration and performance in low- and high-speed corners.

There's one practice session and then straight into one-lap qualifying in the ERS, but you can tweak the set-up after each session. Each time you do there is a small marker for the driver's feedback - whether the set-up was poor, average or good. Like in reality, you'll trust your driver more if he has a higher attribute for feedback.

Some who have played this have complained that it can be too easy to win or carve through the field. Our experience has been less clear-cut.

Archer BMR has only scored one podium outside of its Doha 1-3. It's actually quite difficult to string a complete weekend together - the Doha success, born from fourth and fifth on the grid, came after opting not to take practice manually (cop out). And in qualifying, failing to get the outlap right - you control the speed at which it is conducted and the amount of tyre and brake temperature that generates - ruins the session.

Before the race you have to pick your starting tyres from two slick compound choices, and these vary by event from a range of four compounds (from very soft to hard). You can't fill it up with fuel and go to the end in the ERS - the maximum amount you can start with would typically be good for half the race.

In the race, you can alter the driving style (how hard the drivers work the tyres) and the engine mode (how thirsty it is) for each car. Keen monitoring of both tyre condition and fuel level is important as it heavily influences your strategy.

Using both compounds isn't required in our series. We've found ourselves splitting strategies more than once - and then converging again in the race. It's dynamic, and keeps things interesting.

Another area to monitor is the parts of the car - drivers will flag up concerns if they think something has broken, and there's natural degradation as well. It's very easy to overlook this, or to not bother making a quick repair in the pits at your next stop in the pursuit of a few seconds, and wind up with an ailing car at the finish.

Earlier we mentioned the illegal brakes, and also the short practice sessions in the ERS. Well, both are linked to one of our favourite features on the game.

As a motorsport manager you have a position on the world governing body, the Global Motorsport Association. That means you vote on key topics. For example, we voted in favour of the addition of a new track to the calendar - in the Ardennes.

But coming up shortly are votes on the possibility of introducing spec brakes, and increasing ERS practice sessions to 15 minutes. That'll be a no and a yes from us, in case you were wondering - despite someone trying to bribe us to push through the spec brakes.

This is fascinating. It embodies the living, breathing part of motorsport that the designers - fans at heart - wanted to capture within this game. The fact there's been so much to keep an eye on just halfway through the first season has offered great amusement, but it's also pretty key. As we've flagged up, our HQ has had a new brake-research facility built. While we intend to move up the categories sooner rather than later, and with it spec brakes becomes less likely, we don't want to take a hit in performance now.

Another part of the game that it's easy to overstate the significance of is not about the specificities, and actually regarding the appearance. A nicely put together graphics engine, but the simple fact is having that extra layer of detail, that added depth, enhances the player's experience.

It's not a novelty as such, it's one of several small pieces of detail that just nudges the game up a notch. One downside to this is the computer power the game requires, as it did hammer the battery of our machine pretty hard (we used a mid-2015 Macbook Pro, for reference).

But the positives all add up to a genuinely dynamic 'off-track' element that helps ensure this game has the capacity to retain your interest for multiple seasons.

The version of the game Autosport was able to experience will be refined before its final launch. Bugs have been raised already, the coding is being altered as you read this.

Having been able to invest some more serious gametime has only increased our appetite for the finished product, which should hopefully hit the shelves sometime in September.