A formula-style management sim isn’t the next step you might have expected from the developer of Art of Rally, but that’s exactly what Funselektor (and Strelka Games) has done with Golden Lap, offering a very different take on the top-down F1-esque management genre.
It’s unlicensed, which is arguably its greatest strength as it means it can do things that no official game ever could.
Like what? Well, like drivers turning up for qualifying sessions still hungover from the night before, suffering a reduction in their stats, presumably as they wait for the Alka-Seltzer to kick in.
Then there’s the possibility of fatalities. Get unlucky in a crash and you’ll have to click a dialogue box with ‘A tragedy’ as your only option, and then use your limited resources to hire another driver.
It’s emergent storytelling at its very best as your mind starts to imagine the self-doubt, culpability and pressure on everyone as they try to salvage their season while watching the deceased driver’s name slip down the championship rankings. Harrowing stuff.
‘Get unlucky’ is only part of the story, mind. There is always an element of chance in everything you do, but you do have some control over the variables, so managing the probability of disaster becomes a key gameplay element that isn’t a consideration in other games.
Added to the game over the early preview build we covered is a new ‘stress’ meter, which fills as your driver is told to push hard. In an earlier demo build, pushing hard was more of a consideration for tyre life than actual life, but now it’s linked to both. You can micro-manage this by asking a driver to boost until the bar’s filled orange, then go back to medium push where it falls back to green, allowing you to push while minimising risk.
Combine this with variable engine modes (for which there are a simple three settings) and you can tell your driver to push or manage, which works well. That said, in several instances, our drivers crashed while leading by a minute and on the lowest stress setting, so there’s no absolute way to stay on the road.
All of the above is commendably affected by other factors such as team members’ and drivers’ specific perks, like being particularly good in wet races, or always performing better at tracks set in their home country.
Cheaply hired crew chiefs can make more mistakes in pit stops and better ones can negotiate better sponsor rewards, which are based on fulfilling objectives. This element of the game is well-balanced, as you manage your single-digit account finances, maybe spending $7 on a driver’s contract, and another $6 on car upgrades.
New fabrications of engine units or a new chassis not only boost car stats but also repair components, decreasing the chance of failures. Even the tracks themselves have perks and debuffs, including the increased chance of a fatal crash, so there’s always plenty to consider. Even so, it never feels overwhelming.
What doesn’t work quite so well is qualifying, which isn’t geared towards clever thinking, at least not in a managerial sense. Lap times can be posted on a full-wet track that still eclipse dry laps on softs, which isn’t realistic.
Also unrealistic in qualifying is the way you’re rewarded for simply going out as many times as possible, as each successful quali run allows you to spend yellow hexagon tokens on semi-randomised stat increases, tuning your engine, chassis, and handling stats a little on every return to the pits.
You might be able to max out at least two of these on shorter circuits, but that doesn’t feel as clever as choosing the optimum moment and tyre compound to go for a flying lap in one of the F1 Manager titles.
The races themselves are relatively short, especially when you use the option to speed up time by up to 8x. The race is viewed as a 2D plan of the track with numbered, coloured circles representing the cars. That’s all the detail you get, save for some cute little pitstop graphics.
Drivers will let you know when they’re feeling good or not quite on it, and you can give team orders to allow one of your drivers to let the other go, unchallenged.
However, there isn’t an option to block rival cars, which is disappointing. With no way to stay ahead of anyone while conserving fuel and tyres, it ends up being more about the fastest time strategy rather than the best manipulation of the situation.
Another issue regards balancing. It can seem really difficult to win or even finish at first, but once you learn the game’s workings, you can take the worst team (Night) to McLaren 1988-style dominance in a single season. Our game did balance this out when our star driver crashed in his first race and basically became impotent, dropping stats and hovering around 10th place all year.
But get two good drivers and a good engineer and you’ll soon be making new engines before you’ve even done a lap in the old one, just to get the next component stat boost. It all needs a bit more tweaking.
Without being able to watch the cars in 3D, the game can become a little boring at times. It really does depend on your emotional investment as to whether you’ll stick with the game or not. If you’re not feeling it, and are nonplussed by its unlicensed idiosyncrasies, you may not stick with it very long – although modding support via Steam Workshop is set to add a host of community-made rosters.
But give yourself time to feel like you properly own the team and that the characters are people and it may well click for you, at which point it becomes very addictive, resulting in a real story as you look back over the years at your driver line-ups.
Technically, the game looks like it would run on a crisp packet, but while it does play even on a 2013 MacBook Pro (impressive), it is struggling to do so, probably likely due to modernised graphical routines not suited to the archaic architecture.
It’s far smoother on an M3 iMac or, moving to PC, a Dell G5 gaming laptop, though it does stutter a bit there at 4K. The game also runs just fine on Steam Deck and the touch screen interface works with it, but play on the handheld is very fiddly and all the text is already tiny on a monitor screen, let alone the Steam Deck’s diminutive 7.4-inch panel.
Best to play it on at least a laptop with a touchpad or, ideally, a mouse. Saves won’t transfer over between Mac and PC, but Steam’s save cloud works well between same-family devices.
Golden Lap has a lot in common with New Star GP in terms of humour and simplified management mechanisms, so it really boils down to whether you want to do the driving or watch the computer do that bit for you.
If you prefer to give the orders and watch little circles carry them out, you’ll find a lot to love here. It is an engrossing, addictive and refreshingly different take on the genre, in need of some balancing, perhaps, but full of emergent stories you won’t forget in a hurry.
| Developer | Funselektor and Strelka Games |
| Release date | 26th September 2024 |
| Available platforms | PC, Mac |
| Version/s tested | PC, Mac |
| Best played with | Best played with Desktop on a physically large display (due to tiny text). Looks and feels fantastic on an M3 iMac. |
Full disclosure: A game code was provided by the developers for review purposes. Here is our review policy.
