Copied and pasted from a forum post I made about it because I’m lazy tonight:

Since I am perpetually dumb with money and overly curious, I wound up snagging Pole Position 2010 when I was combing through the Paradox deals on Impulse. I don’t really have much experience with this kind of game beyond a couple of sessions of BATRacer, though.

To get the obvious out of the way, the presentation is…rough. There’s a lot of sloppiness to the interface, like text fields that overlap each other, or how it’s difficult to tell what the overall state of your R&D is without going into each part and clicking the overview option and backing out and moving on to the next part, or how it forces a German keyboard layout onto you and swaps the ‘y’ and ‘z’ keys, or how the cars go in the opposite direction that they’re supposed to on some tracks. Graphics were not a high priority either, as the cars and tracks look like they were ripped from an N64 game, and when racing you don’t even see the cars on the track, just a little pointer indicating their current position.

The ‘tutorial’ is also terrible. It just pops up and gives you a description of each screen as you navigate to it for the first time, and it doesn’t convey any sense of the flow of the game. It was only through trial and error while poking around the screens that I discovered the right order that things have to be done in.

If you can get past those though, it looks like there’s a decent amount of potential depth to the game, as you control pretty much every aspect of team management. You first have to hire staff like your chief engineer, team doctor, team manager, etc., and they act as modifiers on various other aspects (e.g., your lawyer reduces fines). You decide what sponsorship to place on each location of the car, though you really only get to choose from up to three possibilities. You can adjust the inventory levels and pricing of fan merchandise to generate more income. And you can build facilities to help improve things like car construction and research (though in another bit of sloppiness they have a predefined list of places you can build which includes…the Northwest Territories as the location in Canada? Someone was throwing darts at maps).

The real meat is in car construction though, where you have to design parts (there’s around 20 total), construct them, assemble them onto the chassis, and do your testing in the wind tunnel and on-track. This all takes time and staff, so you’ll probably need to supplement it with parts delivered from suppliers, too, and for the low-end teams the supplier parts are probably better than what you’d make anyway. Parts are of varying quality based on things like a performance index, drag coefficient, reliability rating, weight, and wear-and-tear, and you’ve got the usual per-car settings for things like suspension stiffness, tire pressure, brake balance, camber, etc. The drivers give you some feedback about the settings during the practice sessions, but it didn’t really seem like enough; they wouldn’t shut up about the rear brake balance in my sessions, but only mentioned the other settings once or twice. There doesn’t seem to be a persistent log of their feedback either, so you have to watch their little portraits in the corner for the feedback balloons that pop up very briefly.

And then you get to the race, where you may as well sit back and cross your fingers while it plays out for you. The only real control you have is to set a driver’s mode to ‘attack’, ‘save fuel’, ‘hold position’, etc., or to pit early, but the race speed is fast enough that it doesn’t really feel like I can meaningfully switch modes based on what’s actually happening on the track. But the pace is too slow to actually sit there and watch all the laps at the slowest speed, so you may as well hit the time acceleration and just see what the final results are.

I’ve only played a few hours so far, so I haven’t gotten into any of the longer-term stuff like sponsor and team renegotiations, keeping up your team morale, what it’s like when you actually get good parts… I wish I’d played something like Grand Prix Manager 2 for a basis for comparison, though; I’ve heard it been recommended before, but it way predates my interest in the sport.