Reviews from around its release would have you think this akin to a real-life combination of cancer and the actual feces of a bull but I think there's a lot to like about Sumo Digital's 3DS version of F1 2011. It's true that it fails to be a good racing game but it's a decent F1 time trial sim and I think if they had maybe pared this down to its best parts, it could have found an audience the actual released version never did.
The main complaint about this is the AI is terrible and it's completely valid. The other drivers race as if you are not there. If you are on the line the computer controlled cars were going to take around a corner, you are going to get hit by the computer controlled cars because they will follow that line regardless of your presence. Depending on how realistically you have the driving set up, this behavior ranges from infernally annoying to game breaking. It's terrible and there's no getting around it.
The thing is, though, you can play w/o the AI and a lot of the joy of driving an F1 is not lost w/o having competition. F1 2011 has solid driving mechanics top to bottom w/ all the various difficulty and realism settings you would expect in such a game. It delivers much of the thrill of a good racing sim, it just can't do so w/ other drivers on the track. If the primary pull for this sort of game is that feeling you get where after practicing a corner dozens of times, you figure out just how to hit it such that you can get through a sector a split second faster, this game actually delivers.
It might be a stretch but I'd say the fact that this can give you a decent time trial but not a good race might make it a good fit for big time sim enthusiasts--and I mean the kind of people who consider a three-digit priced racing wheel as "entry level." If you live and breath F1 in your gaming life, something like this isn't going to replace the more full-featured home console and PC versions of F1 games but it can give you a chance to get some extra mental reps in when you are out on the road. I'd be curious how this would have done had they called it F1 Trials or something like that and marketed it as a trainer to help F1 memorize tracks and corners.
In any case, this game doesn't focus on time trials and isn't a good racing game so I can't fully recommend this to anyone, especially not here in early 2018. Still, I must say, I figured I'd pop this in for a session or two--just long enough to find something to say about it--and I wound up keeping it in my 3DS for weeks. Especially once you've gotten a track down well enough that you can turn off the racing lines and driving assists, it provides the sort of deeply engrossing driving experience that sims do so well.
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