Do you remember why the short-lived genre of Formula One management games died at the end of the last century? If you don’t, spending some time with the RTL Race Team Manager will quickly remind you.

First of all, I have to admit that I somewhat had to push myself to writing this review. It wasn’t that I dont enjoy writing or reviewing, having to spend time with the RTL Race Team Manager was just a turn-off thought for some reason. But since the blog still gets lots and lots of visits from surfers looking for this game, I decided to give it ago.

I have no idea why I had a bad feeling about this game; it may be a combination of several factors. First of all, this game is marketed by RTL, a German TV station known for shitty reality TV shows and pathetic Formula One broadcasts. RTL also brought Christian Danner to the game; the former Formula One driver is assisting with “professional advice” according to the game’s box. And to top it all of, this game is a budget title, selling for just 29,99€ – I think its getting clear why I wasn’t the most enthusiastic about this one.

But anyways, let’s give it a chance. After starting the game, you have the choice of either taking over an existing team or creating your own. The team-selection screen will be a place of disappointment for many as the games does not have a Formula One license, making you deal with fantasy drivers and teams.

While some names bear resemblance to their real-life counterparts (Michie Gaskoyne, Willi Rumpf), others are completely random for some reason. I have no idea why the creators did not stick with making all of them sound similar, it would have been a good solution. They did however do it with the tracks as all of them somewhat resemble the original layouts with just a few changes.

Team selection also serves as selecting your difficulty level. If you take a pro team, sponsor interest will be higher and you can fall back on better resources. Picking a backmarker team makes things somewhat harder as it’s more difficult to attract sponsors or personnel.

I’ve went with what I suspected to be BMW (a German and a Polish driver, that has to be them, right?), one of the teams in the easy category. Once you picked your team, you can start the season. Here comes the biggest flaw for everybody who is not used to manager games: There is no help at all. Rookies are left in the menu screens with no indication of what to do first, it takes a lot of looking around to figure out how things work.

First thing to do is sign sponsor contracts for the various parts of the car. By doing that, you’ll get a first taste of what this game is about: Clicking!

If it’s finding sponsors or assembling your car, all you do is click. Most of the time there is not really much to choose, you just end up clicking buttons for the simplest tasks. Sometimes, the game shows some mercy by offering an “automatic” button for simple assignments but in many screens you’ll end up doing repetitive clicks again and again.

Once your car has full sponsorship and you have bought all the necessary parts, you’re good to go testing. Apparently, the creators have no idea about motorsports at all as the test run is nothing more but the car accelerating to full speed in a straight line and braking again. I’m no engineer but this is not how testing works!

When the car is complete and has been tested, you can either let your driver practice their starting or wet weather skills or hire and fire personnel. Other tasks include development for future seasons, all this is very basic though with not much stuff to choose or do.

Since there is nothing left to do, you might as well skip to the first Grand Prix. Everybody who knows how Formula One works is familiar with the routine. First you practice, then you’ll qualify before starting the race. Before and during the session, you can change the car’s setup in a very basic way. All this game offers are wing, tire and fuel settings. Suspension? Differential? Unknown things to this game as you have no power to influence any advanced settings.

In terms of graphics, nothing has changed since the last Formula One management games. The 2d race-screen looks just as it looked in Grand Prix Manager 2. The game’s interface is not even widescreen-capable and looks as sexy as your Microsoft Office applications.

The game also offers 3d scenes during the sessions but things get really ugly here. The quality of those scenes has to be described as piss-poor, don’t expect anything close to modern racing games. The scenes are really just scenes; there is no way to see the actual race in 3d. Even if the field is completely bunched up in the 2d view, you’ll never see more than two cars together in the 3d mode. Did I mention that all the tracks look exactly the same too?

Sound-wise, there isn’t anything but a few bad engine samples and some lame electronic music. If you really want to play this game, your best bid is to have Winamp running in the background and turn off the sound in the preferences – You won’t miss anything.

After the race, you’re back in the menu. Again, there is not much to do despite replacing worn out parts or sell some merchandise. You can also use the time until the next race for building your own wind tunnel or a test track. Mind you, all this involves lots of boring clicks until you get to the next Grand Prix with the same boring routine.

You might get the idea that I don’t like management games at all, that’s not the case though. As football (or soccer for you Americans ;) ) managers are very popular in Germany, I’ll end up playing (and enjoying) those once in a while. So it’s not the concept that makes this game a turn-off, it’s the game itself.

It’s simply not rewarding, challenging or motivating at all. There is no atmosphere that could suck you in, it’s just boring. To wrap up the bad taste, Christian Danner’s expert advice (as mentioned above) includes information such as “The rear wing is essential for the car’s grip.” That does sound helpful, doesn’t it?

Conclusion

So is this game worth buying and playing? In short, I would say no. If you’re a die-hard F1 fan, you might find this game entertaining for some reason though. But even a real-life data patch can’t really help this game since all it would do would be replacing the names, there is nothing else to create any atmosphere.

Even the low price of this creation is no reason to buy it. You’re better off to go to the movies three times or buy yourself a nice Formula One DVD than spending 30 Euros on this train wreck.

Agree with my view? Or think I got it all wrong? Please tell me by leaving a comment :)