Can't even launch the game and nothing has been changed

So far I have been left with a bitter taste in my mouth and cannot recommend this game... yet.

Pros:
The graphics and optimisation. I have a FX-8320 and a GTX 970. I'm getting 60+ FPS with the whole grid on ultra.
The handling model. I have a G27 and I am happy with the FFB and the physics have vastly improved, especially compared to F1 2014.

Cons:
No safety car. I don't know Codemasters reasoning for this but I personally feel it takes away from the game.
This game crashes more than Maldonado. Ran a benchmark, crashed. Tried online, crashed. Started pro season mode, crashed. You get the idea.
Littered with bugs. For now there is only one that I find truly game breaking. When I play Pro season mode, (for those who dont know, it is supposed to turn off all HUD and assists and locks you into cockpit cam) I still have all the assists on and since the menu is greyed out I can't manually turn them off.

I would advise anybody interested in this game, to be patient and wait for future fixes and then consider a purchase.

May update this in the future. 10/07/15
------------------------------------------------------------
24 hours of game time later I feel it is time to update my review.

First off, since my first review they released a 2nd patch on the day of release, which is pathetic that it was even needed in the first place as it wasnt even a large one. Thankfully though it seems to have fixed the game crashing so Pastor can now sit safe and keep his reputation.

The more I have driven in this game the more and more I'm enjoying racing the AI and the handling model. The Championship season, Quick race and Time trial modes are the ONLY parts of the game I would consider ready to be released. Pro season and Multiplayer however were and STILL ARE NOT READY.

For the first time in the series you can actually race the AI wheel-to-wheel, and unlike Project Cars there aggresion is about right. The AI are very spacially aware so if you were to dive up there inside they won't turn in on you. They are also very racey themselves as they wont back out 100 metres before a braking zone as before, and will try to outbrake you if you leave the door open. For reference I have the AI on the hardest setting.

However I would consider Championship season mode ready,although it does have a few features missing. You can no longer underfuel the car in this game and since you can no longer run rich fuel mix for longer than half a lap before your engine overheats, I end up with around 5 laps of fuel left at the end of a 100% race. You can no longer fully customize your strategy before the race, you can only choose between preselected strategies given to you by your teams strategist and with 100% races, generally speaking you're given 2 options but if you qualify within the top 10 it's normally 1. My final complaint with Championship season mode is the inability to customize the weekend length. There are 3 choices and cant be tweaked. Short weekend- 15 mins practice, one-shot qualifying, 25% race. Normal weekend- 30 mins practice, one qualifying round, 50% race. Long weekend- 1 hour practice, full 3 rounds of qualifying, 100% race.

Quick race works as it should with you being able to actually tweak it to your liking and there's not much else to say. Time Trial has been improved upon now as at most circuits/corners the game is strict with you leaving track limits, but my new favourite feature is you can copy setups from people at the top of the leaderboards. I highly recommend doing this unless you want to be left alone and know what you're doing. My only problem with Time Trial is that at some corners you can still exceed track limits and not have your lap invalidated. Is it really that hard code"masters" to just invalidate laptimes if you exceed track limits with all 4 wheels regardless of time lost/gained?

I feel the need to mention at this point that the F1 2014 season is also included in this game as I'm rather neutral to its integration. Albeit a nice bonus, I bought this game for the 2015 season and would rather have had them focus more time on the current season than the previous one.

The problem with Pro season mode mentioned in my first review is still there and upon further review I think there was no real need for Codemasters to even add this mode as you can change your HUD, assist and camera angle in Championship season mode to the exact same settings.

Now the real big-hitter that is Multiplayer. Blandly put, the multiplayer is a mess, there's no two ways about it. From unpredictable ghosting, to desynchonised lobbies, to driving through pit crews, to just straight up random teleporting, multiplayer is completely and utterly broken. With a supposed brand-new netcode, which showcases Codemasters "master" coding, multiplayer has been crippled before even mentioning there new matchmaking system known as "hoppers". The main problem with the new system is the player base gets spread out so much between the different game types that it takes so much longer to find the game even in the first week since release.

After having played the game for a longer time period now, I would only recommend this game to people if you are only/mainly interested in the singleplayer experience. If Multiplayer was the main attraction stay clear as if it was a sprintmode lap 1 trainwreck of a pileup.

Further updates pending upon release of further patches or DLC. 14/07/15

Crashes more than Pastor Maldonado, would not reccomend.

Dear Codemasters,

What the hell? I have been a loyal fan of your racing games since 2007, but what is it with the F1 series? All the opporunity and all the promise and in every release problem after problem after problem. The most stable of the series was probably 2012 (though no FP1 and FP2 and the wet-to-dry transition problems still hurt). F1 2015 - released 2 months earlier than has been typical, and it's not ready for distribution. Let's make a simple and, I think, fair comparison:

- DiRT Rally - came with some bugs, but that was the point right? I mean, it was touted as an Early Release title for which the community feedback has been integral to QAing the game as such that you have been able to appropriately focus your development efforts, and it's worked - immaculately. And... For those of us who got in early, we paid what, 60% of the cost of a full release?

- F1 2015 - where to begin. Evidently from a development perspective, QA cycles have been all but completely omitted it seems. Some of the graphical elements are certainly more polished, and the handling model is refined, but otherwise, this bad-boy is completely smattered with issues. I am running an i7 5820 w/ 64 GB DDR4 and 2 GTX 970s in SLI and I am getting significant amounts of "blur" at assorted points throughout gameplay - not only while driving - it really doesn't look great. I tried "Reset To Track" and my car jumped around in reverse, smoked a wall and came to rest backwards on the track - that was an effect I was able to reproduce. The AI continuously drive up from behind me and smoke me like I'm not even there, sending me off track, damaging my car, and even penalising me. In just two hours of gameplay I had a crash when running benchmark mode, a random crash in the middle of a lap, 2 instances where when I started the game it was unresponsive to keyboard inputs for minutes, timing screens which flicker, setup screens which overlay one another making it virtually impossible to read the two conflicting layers of text, and a desaturated (almost to the point of being entirely greyscale) camera view once I used a flashback. All the points about "I can't make my own character", I personally couldn't care (well, aside from missing the helmet which I have used since F1 2010!), but the base playability MUST be there for full release, and in this case it isn't. Oh, and what's up with giving us PC'ers the option to try to use the voice commands if the functionality was never intended for the platform - it almost seems "mean" - queue up that fat Nelson kid from The Simpsons.

It's unfortunate that "the pinacle of motorsport" is not represented appropriately, but I guess with the "state of F1" being what it is, what else can be expected?

DiRT, DiRT 2, DiRT Rally, GRID - all amazing unforgettable titles, but F1 - the series has not been executed to the extent it should have been once yet. That's $360 I have been stupid enough to spend on not a single product which actually worked through and through. At this point I am officially turned off as I expect 50% - 60% of the community is, or will be over the coming days, based on the forums so far.

It's a sad day...





**UPDATED**
More issues:
Multiplayer - constant screen flickering - not changes to the settings from when I play in Championship or Pro Season modes.
Engineer - I cannot hear a word my engineer says even with the car and environment turned down to 50 and the Speech to 100.
Quit Game - Every time I go to quit game, Steam looks as though it's DLing a patch or something, prior to me getting an Error 41.
Multiplayer - obviously not a glitch / bug, but Codies, did you really make the decision to include a Custom Multiplayer season where AI racers were not included? Like, I want to do the full season (co-op or adversarial) with a friend, but I can only race him... Yeah, there's no AI - how fun is that? And otherwise I have to find another 18 people to fill the grid and be online for Practice, Qually, and Race distances...

The quit button works fine!
The uninstall button works fine!
The refund button works fine!


UPDATE 10/23/15:
I played this for another hour, they got their ♥♥♥♥ togehter but still upset that we can't play a championship co-op like the ones before. And I had to buy a new controller because mine was "compatible".

I will give this another few months and get back to this.

CM F1 games have been disappointing since 2012, the only reason i bought this is because of how much i enjoy watching this sport and I wasn't hoping for much when I bought it but F1 2015 has stooped to a new low.

The good:
*Enhanced AI, they're actually racing each other (however they make no mistakes) and they will try aggressive moves.
*Different cars and different engine manufacturers handle quite differentily

The bad:
*Game crashes randomly (and this is after the crash fixing patch)
*Horribly optimized graphics, I can run GTA V on ultra yet i can't run this on high with a stable fps, suddenly i find the game dropping from 60 to 20 out of nowhere.
*Game freezes for milliseconds after you look back and unfreezes at 2x speed when you return to normal view
*Unrealistic rules, you can start on fresh set of tyres instead of quali tyres
*Co-op mode removed
*Safety car removed

and the steaming horse ♥♥♥♥:
*"Career" mode
*Unable to customize the sessions in career mode, why can't i have a 25% race with full qualifying?? you had that feature already why did you remove it?

I'm really hoping the reviews will be so negative that CM will lose the rights to F1, we could use some decent devs to create a playable F1 game or at least get CM to fix this broken port because so far they have disregarded all of their customers.

I've been playing this series for 3 years and this game probably has the best physics basis of the series but the rest is fiasco. No safety car&virtual safety car, no realistic track limit violation rules, no drive through penalty, completely terrible online system (game constantly causes mass disconnection at certain points) and optimization (especially in online) is terrible. I don't even want to mention no career option.

I heard that Codemasters will take some pre-alpha or beta testers from the real players. If Codemasters keep listening 12-year-old arcade-lover English children who are moaning about "auto-spin" kerbs because they spin on a freaking kerb while using full throttle, this series will lose its only good feature: physics.

You need to make driving hard (even more understeer because cars are still bloody fast - almost 3 seconds faster than real life, stiffer suspensions, less grip off the racing line, less grip on the racing line in wet surface - because of the rubber - etc.), make online more stable, provide more freedom (driver customization, maybe increasing driver ability options in career mode, also in season development), introduce realistic track limit rules and more strict penalties.

Edit: Well, after the patch that includes "strict corner cutting rules", I have to revise my review. This game still lacks in almost all the fields I explained above. But they listen to us - they added strict corner cutting rules. And now, beta testers give great feedbacks about the game. In F1 2016, there will be safety car and proper career mode. Also, kerbs will be more punishing, throttle application will be harder, ideal racing line and braking points will make more difference, car setups will be even more effective in F1 2016 (F1 2015 responds changes in car setups pretty well in my opinion, they are on the correct path at least). I hope it will be more satisfying in all aspects.

P.S.: By the way, those in previous paragraph are not my predictions. They are actual feedbacks and observations of one of the beta testers. You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10dQ80PBGGA

Thanks to Steam for REFUND option! ;)

In 4hrs of play time so far, this game has crash more often that my 8hrs in Batman AK. Needs to patch the several issues raised in the forums. Fundamentally the racing is fun, AI on legend will test your abilities (and frustration since they love to hit you in the back), but several issues make this a love, hate thing at the moment. I would suggest buying if you're in desperate need of an F1 game, if not hold off your purchase till it's fixed (if ever) and/or a price drop.

Pros:
=AI much more competitive that previous game, sometimes overly so.
=Graphically looks good and runs at a stable and good fps (Avg ~110 for me) on 1440p, 980Ti.

Cons:
=Damage model severly underwhelming (Go full speed into a wall and you will be shocked at what happen, in a bad way)
=Stuck at 2nd gear after exiting the pits, unable to up or downshift until the end of the white line at the side
=No race weekend weather info in championship mode (Spent practise optimising dry setup only to be greeted with a wet qualy. Game crashed during qualy, load back and it suddenly became a dry qualy)
=No career mode and safety car
=AI loves to crash into you from the back.
=Can't find any online lobbies to play


*Updated on 11 Jul to include more cons.

An all around disappointment. Although being an improvement from the already mediocre F1 2014, this game feels like a major let down by Codemasters. Lots of promises from them and they fail to deliver once again.

PROS :

-Handling model and steering has been slightly improved from 2014 with the new engine
-New engine brings nicer graphics and more details to the environment
-Engine sounds are as good as the real thing
-AI are less passive and way more aggressive, will race you and pursue their overtaking manouver till the end
-Team radio has been enhanced, and the talk to engineer voice recognition is a great idea


CONS :

-Major lack of features. This game feels absolutely bland. It really hurts to see Career mode gone. Championship mode let you choose an existing driver and pretty much do their season. Gone are the days where your name would shine on the podium along big names in the sport. Pro season is pretty much a Preset Championship mode with 100% Race laps, Legend AIs and manual gears. So much for a feature right ? Multiplayer on your own is nearly impossible, nobody plays this game by the looks of it, every time you'll try to get in a Hopper session, you'll end up in a lobby by yourself and AIs. And even if you can get a few people in the lobby, the races are absolutely hideous. It feels more like a cheap Mario Kart game. Fortunately, Time Trial is still here (thank god for that) and that's about it.

-No safety car. No need to explain. Why remove it ? We will never know.

-AI is absolutely dumb. It was a good thing to make them competitive, but they are aggressive to the point of ignoring you on the track. I had so much drama on race starts because of the AI not taking into consideration that you are on the track and they will just push you out of the way. Before F1 2015, the AI was very defensive and weak, but the beauty of it was that they actually knew that you were on the track. On this game, it feels like they are stuck on a rail just like old racing games from the 1990's.

-Damage model is non existant. Yeah, sure, if you hit the wall at least 50 times and end up losing a wheel, I guess that's what damage model is for Codemasters. Jokes aside, you'd think that in 2015, damage model would be on point and realistic with flying debris compared to older racing games but nope, ain't got time for that, right Codemasters ? You can hit the wall at 300+ kph, you'll probably just lose a wheel and the front wing, that's it. If you collide into a wall at 200kph, you'll lose your front wing, and that's about it...

-Handling model and steering is appauling. When you get an oversteer, you feel like you're steering a boat. Yes, a boat. It's nearly impossible to correct a tiny oversteer or understeer just like you see in real life. When you overtake and go wheel to wheel against someone, just one hit makes you spin and go sideways. It is very frustrating. Just a tiny hit and you're off in the gravel on the opposite side of the track.


VERDICT :

When I was a kid playing F1 1997 on PSOne, I thought that it was the best Formula One game ever made.
23 years later, I still feel like it was one the best game ever made. We are in 2015 and this game feels like a cheap excuse to release a licenced F1 game. Would be a good arcade game for younger players or people who don't have a deep knowledge of Formula One.

I'm a hardcore fan and I feel like this is a disgrace to our community. I've dreamed of so much better.
The game could be so much better, but nobody is dedicated enough to make it.

Codemasters should lose their contract with the FIA and let another passionate studio take over the franchise and rebuild everything from scratch and make a game that actually feel like the real thing.