REVIEW # 00000000 00100101
An Official product of the FIA Formula One Championship
Another pearl, another string to Geoff Crammond’s bow. Grand Prix 2, widely known as GP2, follow the footsteps of the previous title and raise the fame of the MicroProse Formula 1 franchise.
Set in the dramatic 1994 season which saw the death of the greatest F1 driver ever, Ayrton Senna and the mortal crash of Roland Ratzenberger’s Simtek during the same weekend, this game let you live again the “old” F1 in a year that saw the beginning of a “new generation” of drives: after the end of the era of Senna, Prost, Mansell and Piquet who were still racing in the early 90’s, 1994 championship saw the rise of drivers like Schumacher, Hill, Coulthard and Hakkinen, maybe the last great driver generation and for sure one of the most victorious of all time.
My heart says…
I think this is the oldest video game I stil play continuously from the first time I put my eyes on it in 1994. After 22 years at least once a month I start a championship and I finish it in a couple of days. I cannot count how many GPs, how many Poles, Wins and fastest laps I made, with every team, with every driver, on every circuit. Way more laps raced than Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher together. They could have given to me a real F1 seat honoris causa for this…
Splash screen
Very essentinal and from the beginning puts you in the mood for the race. It looks like a rhetorical question: Quick Race or Main Menu? Obviously when you’ll be enough skilled you will chose the menu so you can set every option and prepare to race at your best!
Graphics
We can understand the precision of the graphics from the menu: easy, professional and well-made. You can set the graphic detail in order to have the best performance on every PC. The version with the graphic pushed at 100% is awesome, and is still beautiful in the third millennium.
Narrative
Nothing to see here…
Gameplay
As for the previous title the gameplay is almost perfect. The biggest defect of GP2 is the absence of the rain during the races. With the rain it could have been really perfect.
All the drivers and team are licensed and this is the most visible improvement from Formula One Grand Prix, with which shares a great realism (even better than before) and the possibility to race oll the weekend events from the free practive to the proper race.
Maybe is not so perfect the way the game “decide” the results of the race: the position are more or less always the same: if you race a complete championship 99% of the times the classification will be Schumacher, Hill, Coulthard, Berger, Alesi, Hakkinen; Hakkinen is always 6th on the finish line. There will always be the possibility to set random opponent levels but the championship will be an awful thing with Simtek in pole, Katayama winning the race and Larrousse on the podium. Not a good thing…
Being an old game we can see a LOOONG list of loved old tracks: Adelaide, Aida, San Marino, Jerez, the old Hockenheim… :’)
Sound
As always the in-game sound is great but this time the game features also a great music in the menu background. Not bad for a racing game!
Longevity
Did I already told you that I play this game since 1994? Yes? So I don’t need to tell you anything more. Alway 16 circuits with plenty of drivers and teams to try and a great carset editor. If you are at least a F1 fan you will lose your mind on it…
Final score 95/100
Being in the top-3 in my list of F1 games along with Formula One Grand Prix and Grand Prix Legends, you can easily understand why my grade is so high. Compared to the times this is the perfect F1 racing simulation game.
Year: 1994
Developer: MicroProse
Publisher: MicroProse
Genre: Racing
Game Mode: Single Player, Multiplayer
Original Platform: MS-DOS
From same developers/editors:
- Sid Meier’s Piartes! (1987)
- MicroProse Soccer (1988)
- Civilization (1991)
- Colonization (1994)
- UFO: Enemy Unknown (1993)
Inspired to:
- Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (1989)
If you liked it you can also try:
- Formula 1 (1996)
- Grand Prix Legends (1998)
Other chapters of the saga:
- Formula One Grand Prix (1992)
- Grand Prix 3 (2000)
- Grand Prix 4 (2002)
I ❤ Old Games! 
I used to play this one with my dad a lot when I was younger, he was a big fan of F1. As it happens, after passing my exams he bought me a copy of GP3 along with a steering wheel for it which was tremendous fun!
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Yes, GP3 fix the lacks of GP2, such as the possibility to drive under the rain. GP3 is very good too!
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I thumped endless hours into this one in the late ;90s and early ’00s. I even got a mod to make the AI more difficult to improve the game. It was fantastic for its time, it really was.
I believe Juan Pablo Montoya used to put a lot of time into it as well, which helped him learn the tracks before he began his all too short F1 career.
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Fortunately there’s a great community of modders that released excellent improvements to GP2. I remember I downloaded all the carshapes from the mid-80’s to the 00’s and I made like 20 championships each year changind the carshapes, the name of the teams and the strenght of the drivers. It was a big work but the result was great!
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