F1 2010

What surprises me most is how great the game looks from each of the five camera angles. Whether locked on bumper cam, in the awesome cockpit mode or positioned just behind your ride, the sense of speed and sheer unfettered playability makes it hard to decide which is best. Usually they all do a great job of transmitting not only all the information you need, but a fantastic sense of speed.

It's an oft-overlooked area of the overall experience, but the game's roaring audio promises to add that finishing touch to an already uncannily realistic experience, with the overall 'feedback' from the sound of your car playing a crucial part in the 'feel' of the game, according to Gray.

"For example, a little bit of tyre squeal when you feel like you're understeering can actually see your car kind of drift a little bit - that's the kind of feedback that really helps," he says.

As you might expect, Codemasters has to walk a tightrope between making F1 2010 appealing to the more casually minded racing gamer while also keeping the passionate, purist 'tinkerers' happy.

For those who just want to get out there on the track and race with the minimum of fuss, you'll be well catered for, with Forza Motorsport-style colour-coded racing lines and, of course, the controversial rewind feature.

Likely to cause a few of the F1 hardcore to spray coffee over their keyboard in righteous indignation, this GRID-style ability adds a new level of accessibility to F1, allowing players quickly skip back a few seconds before they fouled up.

It might not please the purists, but it's a necessary step, argues Gray. "It can be quite frustrating if you've spent a long, long time racing, and then all of a sudden you've messed up on one corner and that's put you from, say, third down to eighth, or it's put yourself out of the race. It just gives you that ability to rewind very quickly."

Crucially, though, for the purposes of posting times to the online leaderboads, players will have to rely on raw skill alone, with rewinding not an option.

As for pre-race engine set-ups, Codemasters has taken a three-pronged approach in an attempt to cover all bases. The default setups will be ready-tuned to the specific demands of any given track, and "depending on which team you're with, you'll be able to race, and be competitive within that race," says Gray.

"Alternatively you can see the race engineer," he says. "He's got a quick car setup option, so you can say you want your car to be more aggressive, more balanced, or more adaptable, because you can change things on the fly, like your wing settings, or your engine settings.

"But if you're really into your F1, you can go in and do those little fine changes of the aero, brake balances, gear ratios, ride heights, and all those tiny settings that people always like to tinker with." Such changes, though, are likely to only gain you "10s of a second - probably 100ths," so don't get too carried away, eh?

The traditional excitable commentary system that we're used to over the past 15 years has been consigned to the past, with Codemasters adopting a driver-centric approach to everything you see, hear and do