Kalypso - Pole Position 2010 review
Games reviews > Strategy game reviews > Kalypso Pole Position 2010
an F1 team management game with a distinctly unfinished vibe (03/06/2010)
Why is first place on the grid called pole position? Because it's named after Sir Bertie Barkington-Pole, who won every single event in the 1807 Dung Hill Harness Racing Stakes. Alternatively, it may have been an old term borrowed from horse racing, whereby the horse on the inside - usually the number “1” - would be nearest the pole that marked the starting line. Hence pole position. We prefer the Bertie story, though.
As the ultimate finisher, Sir Barkington-Pole wouldn't have been too impressed with Pole Position 2010. There's a number of problems here, the main one being that the game hasn't been finished properly. It's not even a simple matter of a lack of polish: the problems run deeper than a good turtle-waxing would solve. Indeed, this management sim has a rushed out feel to it pretty much across the board.
The tutorial marks the first tell-tale sign. The enterprising but clueless newbie F1 team manager is presented with a few pop-up screens, which are basically slightly rejigged paragraphs taken from the instruction manual. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the manual was actually well written and informative, but instead it's overly concise, and doesn't attempt to explain anything in any real detail.
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You're left to fiddle around and discover the mechanics for yourself, although that's okay in some respects, as a lot of the game is fairly easy to figure out anyway. However, sections such as car setup and research are trickier to get a handle on. Absolutely no guidance is given on how to set your front tyre camber, or how suspension should be adjusted for the various tracks.
When it comes to researching a new rear wing, do you want to make it longer, a bit wider, or give it more height? No design help is offered whatsoever, and you're very much blundering around in the dark. So we went for something that we thought would look groovy (although the game wouldn't let us add shark fins).
However, after our initial confusion, we soon got the distinct impression that many of these details don't actually matter that much anyway. Car setup didn't seem to make much difference, and on most tracks we just kept the same fairly low set wings; even twisty-turny Monaco didn't seem to reward higher wing settings to any noticeable degree. We never really tuned the other more complex variables like tyre cambers at all, and our team still did well enough.
The game also lacks impact in the decision making department, because there isn't much to weigh up. Sponsors chuck huge lumps of cash at you, even if you're managing a smaller racing team, meaning it's possible to hire all the best staff and buy up pretty much everything you want, with no real fear of going in the red. In terms of depth it all feels rather shallow, and matters don't improve when it comes to track day.
Race tactics seem pretty much redundant, unfortunately. Beyond fuel and stop strategy, you can give a small selection of orders to your drivers, such as “attack”, “hold position”, or “conserve fuel”. When our top ranked driver with superior skills was in second place, and our other driver in the lead, just a second ahead of him, we told the latter to drive conservatively, while giving the former instructions to attack and overtake. Fifty laps later, our secondary driver took the chequered flag, leaving us scratching our heads as to exactly how a much better driver, ordered to press hard, managed to trail his junior on a go-slow for almost an entire race.
But it's really not so surprising when you've spent a while with Pole Position 2010, as you realise a lot of elements seem to be broken. When training our drivers - they're all ranked in various stats - we scheduled a bit of fitness training to keep them in shape. So their fitness plummeted, naturally. After a couple of weeks, the game informed us that the fitness statistic of our lead driver had gone down a whopping ten points, when in actual fact it had increased by seven points.
Races are depicted in a simple isometric track view, with occasional 3D graphical “highlights” shown when drivers overtake. These are thrilling three-second clips of one car driving past another on a straight, with the rest of the chasing pack mysteriously vanishing to aid rendering. Call us cynical, but we reckon they're mostly in the game so Kalypso could put a nice 3D race shot on the back of the box. They seem buggy, too, as sometimes the names of the drivers involved don't appear, making these cameos even more pointless. At the start of one race we had to sit through about fifteen clips, back to back, which was quite frankly bewildering... or possibly a bug.
We could go on and on about the bugs. The spelling mistakes, the menu text which runs over the next column, the fact that when you type a “z” in a saved game name, it comes out as a “y”. Why indeed? Or the flaws in the reality of the game: one of our drivers put in a lap time a minute slower than the other, yet on the race track graphic he clearly remained right behind him. Obviously he must have hit some sort of temporal warp at the Hotel Mirabeau corner.
When you witness obvious flaws like this, you wonder what other mistakes are occurring in the game engine that you can't see. And then you start to lose faith in the whole thing completely. Pole Position 2010 is clearly in need of a good patching at the very least, but we think it would have to be stripped down and rebuilt before we could be persuaded to return for another season
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