F1 2010

My favourite racing game of all time is Star Wars Episode 1: Podracer on the Nintendo 64. I liked it because it could boast the most astonishing sensation of speed; it really felt like you were doing hundreds upon hundreds of miles an hour, hanging on for dear life on the back of these unimaginably powerful vehicles, almost afraid of releasing the full fury of their vast engines.

F1 2010, the new racing release from Codemasters, is the first game since Podracer to give me the same sense of blunt velocity. In fact, it feels much, much faster. However, while Podracer had an easy-going ,pick-up-and-play accessibility – as do Codemasters' other racers, such as Colin McRae: DiRT2 – F1 2010 clearly has aspirations of being a proper, grown-up simulator.

Even with all the driver aids turned on, the cars are a serious handful. With the mollycoddling auto-brake feature where the car practically does everything for you but steer, it is still very easy to spin out, flip the car like a pancake, or otherwise make a pig's breakfast of everything. The driving rules are unnecessarily draconian, and there is an uncomfortable feeling that the game is judging you for your slapdash driving skills. Cut a corner, or depart in almost any way from the track, and you get a snotty little "lap disqualified" message, even in the supposedly plug-and-play Time Trial Party mode.

Inevitably for a realism-chasing sim, there are areas of the car set-up which an automotive engineering PhD, or a career as an F1 pit boss, are needed to understand fully: detailed tyre physics, dirty air mechanics, downforce generation and so on. This is not uncommon in games like this, but here they spill over a little more than I'd like into the actual driving experience. I don't like when a loading tip informs me that I need to think more carefully about slipstreams. I have never thought about slipstreams in my life, and I don't intend to start now.

But while F1 2010 dances this risky jig along the brink of the opaque simulation abyss, in the end it manages to avoid falling into this chasm by adding features like the "flashback", which allows you to go back a few seconds and re-attempt a corner if a silly mistake has cost you a hard-fought race.

The result is a supremely challenging driving experience that, in terms of sophistication, makes Podracer look like Mario Kart. Sure, this is not the easiest game in the world to pick up and play absent-mindedly, but every successfully navigated corner makes you want to spray a magnum of champagne all over your living room, and it is a genuinely great feeling when you begin to know a track intimately and improve your time. Rainy weather racing, too, has got to be experienced; not just for the utterly gorgeous spray physics and clever active weather system, but for the exquisite difficulty of maintaining control and building up your speed in the wet.

Switching off each driver aid is a real victory, and improving your car control is very satisfying – even if, as in real Formula 1 I suppose, the final few iota of performance are closed off to those without the razor-sharp reflexes of an athlete. The Xbox controller feels a little inadequate to the handling, in fact; the game makes much more sense if you play it with the full race seat, steering wheel, pedals and gearbox set-up, as Codemasters were demonstrating at the game's launch. There are several new multiplayer options, including Time Trial Party mode, though – as is becoming more and more the norm – no split-screen playability (come on, developers, how hard can it be to add a split-screen mode? If Podracer could do it on the 64, there's surely no reason to leave it out on the Xbox or PS3). The single-player career mode is also good, though the tedious press conferences and interviews could easily have been dropped.

F1 2010 is an extremely accomplished game, which blends enthusiast-level nerdiness seamlessly with an admirable playability, and even if it is a little on the brutal side, it deserves its place on the podium of great driving simulators.