Golden Lap review: A love letter to racing’s past with near-immaculate vibes

You can taste champagne. Then, all of a sudden, I can’t.

Both have Ferraris completely out of the Monaco Grand Prix, bringing along with them the dominant force that monopolized the top step on the podium in three races in 1970. For a short time, my Not Williams team wins their first victory under my management team.

I feel guaranteed.

After that, one of our cars hits the barrier and everything becomes more unstable. It’s in my remaining driver, Britontim Morstan (his crap goat beard and very 70’s hairstyle) – I’ll take it home. All he has to do is finish without retreating so hard he gets stronger on one of the few remaining threats. For things like 30 laps, I see the dots on his screen risk the needle between barriers I can’t see, but knowing there.

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Tim brings it home and wins. Next season, he will offer all 10 wins and assault his first championship. After that, he can’t defend his crown, despite portraying the points with a new teammate I hired for him – Antonio Villalba jealous of him throwing such wobble if he’s in a car worse than going below average from the best driver in the world.

You can write your own history like this when you play in collaboration with Golden Rap career mode, Larry Oblary and the racing management sim of the absolute Drift Studio Fan Selector Lab. This mode is a huge game appeal and when we had a golden lap steam demo earlier this year, we had the opportunity to dig deeper than we could.

The way audio and visuals blend to create something very comfortable can be ripped aside quickly to convey the seriousness of one of the cars bustling around a track map that hits a barrier. A simple gameplay loop of setting up a team by hiring four people who hire personalities quirks and statistics you like. And determine the amount of risk you want to employ performance in your baseline car. How you always have to think with your feet on which tires you should always wear, the amount of fuel you can burn, or how to manage the amount of stress putting your driver if you ask them to overtake or put their tracker behind.

All Golden Rap tracks have given an interesting twist to the iconic real-world venue. |

It’s all great, and it blends with other pros who only experienced in the full version of the game. The parody track slates are all great, from Francis Hollow to the Sake Speedway, paying homage to real-world counterparts through their traits and corner names that discover whether they hover to most bends. The latter really helps in infuse the game with the same subtle sense of humor as previous releases of FunseLektor, with the whole slate offering enough kind to make things not get old anytime soon.

The diversity of drivers and team staff offers a variety of different combos for any build you are aiming for. At the top edge, there are people who are tired of their work. At the bottom you will find a vague or true crap choice. A potential worldviewer in the right situation, but otherwise it is too orderly to pass quickly and orderly, and tends to lob it on the wall regularly, flawed in a way that could potentially extend to being a straight jerk that engineers can’t stand. They are your Heinz Harald Frenzens, your Roman Grosine, or your Jean Aresis.

That said, the main hangup I came across was related to the strange habits of the gaming driver market. As mentioned in preview, Golden Rap puts drivers into its gameplay that could be killed or injured in a crash, just like the melancholy reality of the time. In general, the way it is handled is spectacularly moving, and the cadence in which such a tragedy occurs feels natural, but when a dead or injured driver is replaced, the game appears to be portrayed from a separate pool from the main driver market. Some drivers in this pool – I have continued to meet Lucas Verhoven and Ethan Ward – as good as some of the top drivers in the market.

Golden lap team screen.
How much cash you have at any given time, or you have saved tactically, defines what kind of team you can build. |

This has a pretty big impact on your ability to play not just for the season, but for the entire career. By acquiring one of these drivers, teams often get a significantly better finish on their car, increasing the budget they earn through builders at the end of the year. This isn’t too much of a problem if these drivers are constantly dragging runs on front pack full-time drives with better teams and better teams for the next season, but so far I’ve seen them come into my market to be hired for themselves. Across the savings of two different career modes, it was pretty frustrating and immersing, so considering what the game is doing, it definitely requires sorting.

Also, these drivers did not appear in the pool I was given to hire when one of the drivers tragically died. The fact that I can afford a pay driver anyway, I was early in the second season of playthroughs with nights, so a small team starting at the back of the grid – and in the offseason all my savings completely revamped the team to be completely competitive and insulted the injury.

To be honest, that accident was an exception to the difficulty rule because I could hire and who could hit the championship lead in the first two races, took a really good driver. I jumped towards the frontlines of the grid with seasonal switches, but when I spent the most time on my career saves, if I was there, I wouldn’t have had much trouble staying on top.

Golden Lap car management screen.
Upgrades need to go ahead of your opponents, but everything comes with risk and price. |

It may ruin the wonderfully relaxed minimalism that defines golden laps, but it could be a valuable addition, especially if you have two drivers fighting for the title. After all, F1 in every era is equally defined by the behind-the-scenes and on-track handbags between the racers and the people they help them race.

Beyond that, the Career Mode is very ripe and runs well enough to carry the game as the only mode, except for the Quick Race mode where you can choose a preset team and compete in one event, but I think adding something like a future custom championship mode will be reduced. Even if that allows you to God to play a little more competitor in your career save, you may still pick tracks on the calendar each year and get other tools that will help you engineer your own scenario.

Overall, the release version of Golden Rap is a game I enjoyed earlier this year, even in some areas where it could get better. It knows exactly what it wants to offer, and does so in a wonderfully distinctive way that comes to define a game of fan selector and helps to stand out from the race crowd. Without giving you the actual whims of gasoline smoke, you can whid your ears properly with the engine roaring from behind the engine, or offer a full podium of mouths, capturing the spirit of what it portrays, and with some tweaks it could be even more appealing.


Golden Lap will be released on PC on September 26th. This review was conducted on PC using code provided by the publisher.

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