I used to love Formula One, especially back in what you might argue was the sport’s heyday, when the likes of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna went toe to toe regularly, including the 1989 season, when they both ended up on the same team at McLaren and infamously crashed into each other at Suzuka in both 1989 and 1990. Murray Walker and James Hunt commentating on BBC One, with Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain as the theme music. Marvellous.
4PGP might not have the official F1 licence, but the cars are clearly thinly veiled cyphers of the 1991 season’s runners, from backmarkers like Coloni and Leyton House, through the middle of the pack with Tyrrell and Jordan, to the frontrunners in Ferrari, McLaren and Williams. I just wish it were possible to rename the manufacturers on PS5. PC owners appear to have that privilege, causing mild jealousy.
The developers behind 4PGP are French outfit Vision Reelle, who had a hand in the likes of the Test Drive Unlimited series, as well as The Crew and its sequel, and multiple iterations of Gear.Club on Switch. Additionally, there’s Tomiyuki Kawamura on music duties, his background being at SEGA in the 1990s, where he composed music for Virtua Racing on Mega Drive and the original SEGA Rally Championship, among others. Oh, and Kenji Sasaki, once of SEGA Rosso and Hitmaker fame, is also on board; the director of SEGA Rally 2 on both Model 3 and Dreamcast. So, it’s fair to say that the guys behind this have racing game pedigree.
4PGP is very much an arcade racer in that regard, with the twelve initial tracks available loosely modelled on real-world tracks, though not necessarily those from the 1991 season. Australia, for example, isn’t Adelaide from the conclusion of that year’s championship, instead being more like Phillip Island, where the current race takes place. The same goes for Italy, which is actually San Marino’s Imola track, and France, which is Circuit Paul Ricard as opposed to Magny-Cours. At least the British GP takes place at a simplified Silverstone, and the other tracks are also decent stabs, with Brazil being Interlagos and Belgium being Spa, among others.
But if you want historical accuracy, 4PGP isn’t necessarily for you. It’s definitely fun, though the AI racing off into the distance at the beginning of any race on Veteran or Expert never gets old. Except it does. Very quickly.
At the outset, you’ll only have nine of the twenty total cars available to you, though I opted for the Handcraft RJ12, representing the below-average Footwork that was notable for only finishing three out of sixteen fixtures that season. While its real-life reliability was spotty at best, the top-speed attribute is the perfect blunt tool to bludgeon your way through the Novice difficulty championship and unlock some decent cars that will give you a fighting chance at the higher difficulty levels.
The better vehicles in 4PGP are locked behind winning championships at Novice, Veteran and Expert levels. The first option is straightforward enough and a decent way to learn the tracks, but to unlock any cars that will allow you to prevail, you’ll need to get stuck into the Veteran and Expert.
At Novice and Veteran difficulty, you’ll probably do OK once you get yourself into the mindset that this is a pure arcade experience and lifting off the throttle is for the weak. But as you get into Expert level, you’ll soon realise that, no matter what you do, you’re often going to be on a hiding to nothing despite your best efforts. For example, we discovered that on Novice level, the Suzuka track can be won without much effort. I assumed it would then be a straightforward enough task to win on Veteran difficulty and unlock the reverse option. Or so I thought.
It immediately became apparent that some pretty harsh rubberbanding was in effect, and the tyre wear that wasn’t a factor on lower difficulties came into play. If the rubberbanding AI drivers didn’t get you, the tyre wear model would. If tyre condition drops below 30%, your speed falls right off, giving the drivers behind you a massive advantage, at which point they are immediately on your tail. If they don’t take you out while passing, which happens far more often than we’d like, they speed past like you are standing still. Sure, it’s an arcade racer, but the balance seems that bit off.
Multiply this by three races in each of the four championships, and you’re looking at tough sledding if you want to unlock all the tracks and vehicles available. The worst part is that if you choose the restart option for a race, it bumps you back to the start of the three-race series. So yes, not ideal.
The 4P aspect of GP is all well and good if you have four DualSense controllers, as 4PGP is a local-only affair, though we note that Remote Play via Steam is possible. This reviewer only has a couple of controllers, and it is at this point that we curse Sony’s continual insistence that PS5 games can only be played with a proper DualSense. That said, two-player multiplayer is fun enough anyway. We just wish we could have split-screen horizontally rather than vertically.
In conclusion, 4PGP is a decent enough arcade racer that harks back to the halcyon days of when we only had four TV channels and Teletext was where we got our news. It’s not quite there in terms of capturing the full blue-sky gaming feel, but it’s not far off either.
Vision Reelle’s 4PGP is out now on PS5 and PC, published by 3GOO K.K.