As soon as I get to the top of the world with a double points haul, the world decides that it needs some readjusting in the balance, and I lose my top driver. Gone too soon in the championship that should have been easier for us to gain more valuable points, shame really.
Golden Lap is the latest game by Funselektor that’s part of the homage to the old-school golden days of motor racing, complete with hangovers and sudden driver departures for which that era was infamous.
It’s the incredible touch of authenticity without the actual names in it that makes Golden Lap already look good on paper, so how does it play in real life? Marvelously, I can say.
Presentation![]()
Like both Art of Rally and Absolute Drift, the minimalist art design that’s backgrounds with the sounds of the sessions ongoing, with the zooms of the cars, and the beeping of the pitlane entry as your drivers pit in to come in, it sells the immersion value, even with the basics of views that players might be used too. It has that feel of Football Manager from the 2000s era, a feeling that I do miss myself.
The UI is incredibly intuitive and easy to read, with the help tips hovering to make sure the player gets it, even during race time. It’s such a lifesaver during those moments when you need to see whether the tires or rain are falling during that time and day for the race.
All of this coupled with the background music that sounds so calming as your blip on the track map goes around the course makes Golden Lap look and feel incredible to play already. Like just trying to find the “who’s who” within the game’s drivers and team names is quite fun too, it just oozes charm that folks would enjoy seeing.
Gameplay
For the uninitiated, Golden Lap plays in a way that you’ll have two dots/entities/drivers that you have to take care of throughout 20-30-minute intervals within two sessions per track, one is qualifying and where you set up your car to perfection if you can (in order to get the golden lap) to be as high up as you can on the grid and set-up for the race.
That’s where the elements, rival teams, and even the race track itself can play a part in the bit for you to either get a win and points or rather try to scrape by finishing in one position below points, it’s the joys and sorrows of motorsports, condensed in its simplest form.
It can get very brutal too, as drivers can get hurt or even worse, perish during the race if the race track has the dangerous trait or your car breaks at the worst time. And it hurts to see when it happens to you or even your rivals because you can still see their names on the standing list before the season’s end and it does feel morbid too, to see their name still on a standing as a newer driver takes their place.
And these drivers (and also team members) have their own traits and quirks as well. Your driver could be the Piers Courage of Italy and only perform on these tracks due to their national pride trait, or is calm at the wheel like Mike Hill does make the drivers you hire unique, and even hurts more when they retire, willingly or not.
There’s also the upgrading and maintenance of the cars after each race that you’ll have to contend with. Like Golden Lap’s peers, there are power and maintenance bars that you can gradually upgrade over the seasons and it carries over when you build the car for the next season, be it a normal car or something experimental, the latter of which could break your car easily and you know what happens after.
It’s the combination of these elements that makes Golden Lap quite fun to play, it doesn’t really reinvent the wheel that much within this motorsport management genre but its mechanics are so solid enough that it becomes those “games you start and then hours pass” sort of deal.
Content
Golden Lap will not end, figuratively. Like once you win the championship and are the top team, it restarts all over again, It’s the way of motorsports where your win only sets in the off-season, and then you start again.
Every season starts, you pick your drivers, engineers, and race chief, and off you go once again. Round 1.
And with mod support expected for this title coming in, you can expect the community to add in the “official teams and pilots” of a certain formula series or any other series if they so desire when that goes live. The world is their oyster, so to speak.
Personal Enjoyment
This one is quite a unique game within my current list of replayable backlog of games that I have been playing this year, with the way it looks and plays just feels right as a sort of distraction or played during a break sort of deal, like you can be talking to someone or a group of people and still nail the setup stuff to make your cars go a bit more faster.
It’s a game I could see taking off when it reaches the mobile/on-the-go platforms like smartphones and the Switch but that’s me getting ahead of myself, so for now it’ll be my “talking on Discord” as this game plays in the background.
Verdict
Golden Lap excels in becoming a racing management game that’s stylized and fun to play, plus the randomness of the races and sometimes the outcome within any round is always interesting to see it play out.
My biased advice is to just grab this one at launch and have a blast, support the developer for making a management game that has the sauce, as the kids would say. I know I would.
Played on PC, Review copy provided by the publisher.
Golden Lap
Excels in becoming a racing management game that’s stylized and fun to play, plus the randomness of the races and sometimes the outcome within any round is always interesting to see.
- Presentation 9.5
- Gameplay 8.5
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 8.5