F1 Challenge 99-02 breaks the tradition of offering the cars and teams of a single season and allows us to emulate our favourite driver or team from the last 4 years. You can also race at any of the tracks for that particular season. It's important to make you aware of the difference this PC title has over it's yet to be released console kin. The console titles will be called F1 Career Challenge and will offer a career path where you can start out as a rookie and work your way to the top. The PC version lacks this feature, although 'lacks' is probably a strong word because the game never feels like it has anything substantial missing. The thing we will say is that maybe this kind of option would make choosing the season you want to race in easier.

If your familiar with the F1 series from EA, F1 Challenge wont throw too many surprises, but if you're new to F1 simulations, and let us stress the word simulations, it may help knowing that this isn't the kind of game where Gran Turismo rules apply. It's also not a game you will master in an afternoon, or even a week. F1 racing is as much technology as it is seat of the pants racing, and maybe even more so. F1 Challenge shows and rewards the patient, consistent and most of all practiced driver. The best rewards will be had from constant practice laps, fine tuning your car and then going out and racing clean, fast lines, while staying out of the way of the opposition. The rush of adrenalin you get from being in a close pack of cars is not the kind that makes you want to bash your way through to the front. It's the butt clenching, lemon-face puckering kind that has you just trying to survive and praying "Dear lord please don't let me screw this up". Even driving around during practice sessions requires an immense amount of concentration because these cars are Fast with a capital F.

For the novice driver there are options a plenty to help wean you into racing at higher levels. You can choose various degrees of assistance in areas like braking, traction control, gear shifting, stability and steering. Some of these are essential if you're driving using a joystick or heaven forbid the keyboard. A nice feature is the ability to alter these while racing so you can give yourself an instant helping hand should the need arise, or make things more challenging as your confidence builds. The AI level is also adjustable aswell as both the speed/ability they have and also their aggressiveness. More aggressive AI will try harder to get past you if they are faster or do more to stop you passing them. One of the things we think could have been done better is the interface to all these options. There are so many things you can alter like race rules, lengths, sound and visual options, it seems a little daunting at first, and to be honest the whole game can be daunting to begin with. The 50 page manual explains a lot of these options though, so once you get passed this and put some time into racing, the beauty of F1 Challenge is yours for the taking.

Speaking of beauty, there have been a number of improvements to the visuals of this game over its predecessor. The sky textures are stunning, the car skins look sharp and the wet weather effects are absolutely phenomenal. Just when you thought you had this F1 racing thing sussed, you have a race at a track where the rain has taken hold. Trying to race with half the grip, and a quarter the visibility could have you bursting a vein, but you really have to admire the sight as well.