SEGA ‘Motorsports Manager’ (2016 PC) Review
If you are a rabid fan of Formula One racing and dream of being a driver, there are lots of games in this world that cater to your desires. But what if you dream of being higher up on the F1 team ladder? What if you would rather be Toto Wolf or Christian Horner instead of Sebastian Vettel or Jensen Button? Well, that is what the new Motorsports Manger game from SEGA looks to provide.
The game is built as a simulation for running an F1 team from front to back. Not only do you control strategy and tactics on race day, but you have to manage a full team — from deciding what parts to buy, upgrade, or research for your car, to hiring new talent throughout the organization. You even have options for upgrading specific facilities on the main company campus, so that your various departments can operate more efficiently. The game even forces you to deal with picking and negotiating sponsorship deals to maintain your cash flow.
From the start, the game does its best to ease you into the process by offering you your choice of team to run, from the lowly backmarkers up to top-tier teams. Each team is unique in its setup of driver talent, engineering talent, available cash flow, and base car quality. The game also makes sure to let you know which team will be easiest to start with, so you don’t take on a challenge you aren’t prepared to cope with.
Once you start the game up, you jump right into your first race to learn how to control your drivers and plan out strategies to maximize your position on the track. The main cycle of the game consists of watching a field of tiny cars cruising around tracks from a helicopter-style view. From your eye in the sky, you can alter the aggression and driving style of your drivers to affect their tire wear and fuel usage. Then you manage the race in the same way you see the teams on TV doing it. Pit early to try for an undercut to gain track position, or push your driver to the limit and change tires more often in the hopes that the extra pace will help you overtake on track.
After the race is over, you get to take care of the nitty-gritty details of running a team. If the idea of dealing with the deepest and most-minute details of running a modern Formula 1 team gives you convulsions, you should just stop reading now and pass this game over. But if the thought of reading a dozen emails, trying to calm a diva driver, planning the next expansion for your wind-tunnel testing center, and renegotiating contracts with your second driver’s main mechanic all gets you fuzzy inside, then you are a very, very broken individual. BUT, Motorsports Manager might just be your favorite game of all time.
Honestly, most of your game time will be spent buried in the pages and pages of menus as you try to balance a collection of part upgrades, repairs, team management issues, and trying to court enough sponsor dollars that you don’t go bankrupt and get fired. And yes, you can do poorly enough that your team owner gets fed up with you and kicks you to the curb, so do try to put some effort into the job.
The game is complex with all the parts and pieces you need to keep track of in order to make a successful team, but strangely, it actually doesn’t feel very deep. Once you make it through a few races, the game starts to feel very mundane. You complete a race, then you begin the tedious tasks of managing everything. Rinse and repeat. When the season ends, the best team goes up to a higher tier of racing series, the worse teams fall back. Sometimes you can swap to a different team and work there. But beyond that change of scenery, the game feels exactly the same, race after race after race.
For a PC game, it feels empty and mundane, and I think that goes back to its roots. You see, Motorsports Manager started a few years ago as a mobile game of the same name. Now to be fair, the PC game looks better by a magnitude that can’t be measured, and there are a lot more systems and intricacies of the systems that never existed on the mobile version. That said, I can’t shake the feeling that this game would still be better on a mobile device. I find myself having a hard time sitting down for any real length of time to play Motorsports Manager on my desktop. But every time I find myself sitting somewhere for a few minutes waiting around, I have an odd itch to manage my team. Whether I am in the airport terminal, or waiting for the Uber to arrive outside a hotel somewhere, I could be managing my F1 team and pushing us to a successful season. But when I am at home in my office chair, there are about a million other things I would rather do, watch, or play.
That brings me nicely to my final piece of criticism for Motorsports Manager; its price. At a retail price of $34.99, I just can’t recommend it to most people. There are a few of my friends that are fanatical F1 followers that I have suggested the game to, but for the vast majority of people out there, 2016’s PC release of Motorsports Manager is too light on content and fun while being a bit too heavy on cost.
Motorsports Manager was reviewed on the Project Stingray PC using a retail code provided by SEGA.
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