It's been a year or two now since both Sony and Electronic Arts abandoned the official Formula 1 licence, with both companies struggling to make compelling and lucrative games from it.

Given that gamers have been demanding far more varied racing titles in the years of late, that's not particularly surprising, and given too that there's not too much you can add to an F1 title from year to year, it's perhaps understandable that the games themselves started to stagnate.

What the time gap has left, however, is the space for Codemasters to come in and snap up the licence (and with its pedigree in Colin McRae and TOCA games, that's no bad thing). It's also a benefit that it's been a while since we've seen a Formula 1 game, as the firm's F1 2009 is actually really good fun.

For the Nintendo Wii version, which is first out of Codemasters' traps, it helps that beneath all the promise of realism and official re-creations of everything, the game itself has been tempered a little. As is perhaps befitting the stereotypical audience of the Wii, this cuts a few simulation corners and focuses instead on being an entertaining racer. This proves to be a wise choice, although serious petrolheads may be disappointed.

That said, F1 2009 is still very much an official Formula 1 game. You get the proper circuits, the proper cars and the proper drivers. You also get a three-season career mode to tackle, to try to become the best driver in the world. That said, you can scale it to your level of interest and expertise easily enough.

When you get to the track itself, it's refreshing to find an F1 game where flying in the face of caution actually brings some rewards. The technical nature of Formula 1 often dampens the excitement levels somewhat, and Codemasters has been keen to address that here.

As such, there's a real sense of speed, and if you keep the driver aids on you can attack circuits in a way that previous F1 games never really encouraged you to. For the more experienced driver, the upcoming Xbox 360 and PS3 titles are going to be meatier and more realistic, but if you switch the driver aids off here you'll still be getting a solid challenge.

If career modes aren't your thing, though, you can also attack the game piecemeal, courtesy of the dozens of challenges you can choose to tackle. These give you objectives to meet in order to beat said challenge, with your reward being the unlocking of further material.

Whichever approach you opt for, you control the game via the kind of plastic steering wheel adapter that you may already have in your possession from Mario Kart. This contraption accommodates the controller and actually works quite nicely. It's far better than something like the Wii Zapper that we'd seen previously, and it does help as you charge for the F1 title.

Codemasters has put together an impressive game here. It doesn't feel particularly realistic, and occasionally there are moments where you'll ask questions of the opponent AI. But it nonetheless works and entertains a good deal more than we were expecting it to. It's not a radical reworking of anything, nor does it move the racing genre forward. It's just a good, solid, fun F1 game. After the barren lands of the last year or two, that'll do nicely.

Verdict
A good, entertaining and fast F1 game, that does enough to paper over its realism gaps.

Company: Codemasters

Tags: codemasters formula one colin mcrae electronic arts mario kart sony games video games