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Golden Lap is a little game about managing an F1 team in the dangerous world of the 1970's. It isn't all that complicated of a game, and rather I preface this review with the fact that this is less of a positive review, more of a neutral.
The game itself when it comes to managing your team is simple. This is a numbers game. You get a budget to build a car in 3 ways - Conservative, Balanced or Experimental. You have a greater chance of a better car with Experimental (range of about 500 or so point difference in parts) but also a chance of having a terrible one. Where as Balanced and conservative keep the ranges closer but the highest number is lower. Its a risk/reward system. pay a bit more hope for a better car, or pay less and get a less better car but less chance of an absolute turd.
Between races there is little to manage your team, except use the money gained to build new parts. There is an option here to upgrade the reliability of parts for $3. Or you can pay $5 to get a new part which is better and resets its reliability to a high level. No brainer on the choice here, NEVER use the reliability upgrade.
Race weekends are where 95% of the gameplay is. Qualifying where you tune the car to try and get a better time to start the race higher, and the race itself. There are a few things in the race screen that might raise a few eyebrows here. The layout of the game, and the way you select things is pretty much taken/ripped from Motorsport Manager's mobile games. Even the way information is displayed is a direct rip. I cannot fault 'if it ain't broke' logic, but then when you go to tune the car parts you're offered with options on what to do, and how much it'll affect the car. Mimicing the "tuning cards" from the MM3/4 Mobile Games. Engineer has up to 20 points to use. Each card is worth 1-5 points. This feature being 'taken' from MM3/4 Mobile is pretty frustrating. And made Qualifying a chore. Especially since on some tracks you're doing up to 8/9 laps and just clicking a random chance of 0-14 extra numbers and always seeing the 0 pop up.
The raceday is where MM as a whole similarities come together. You have 3 engine modes and 3 aggression modes - Low, Normal, High (same as MM), as well as some basic 'Do/Do Not Overtake Teammate'. Depending on which team you play as, this racemode can be very very disheartening. The top teams will often lap cars up to maybe 4th or 5th in the race. Period accurate I suppose, but you feel very much powerless against your closest rivals too if you're playing one of the lower teams. You spend the race responding to what happens. Changing tires when needed. The problem with the Aggression modes is that you'll never use "High" because drivers have a Stress bar, and the higher this is the more likely they'll crash. This is detremental to you, so naturally NEVER use it (That makes 2 parts of the game never to be used now). The engine modes consume more fuel and also break your parts faster. Thing with this... your parts rarely break if you're clever thanks to one additional mechanic unique to the game;
This is the 1970's. Drivers will perish. This is a cold reminder of the reality of motorsport in this era. Some tracks even have +50% chance to accidents being catastrophic meaning that getting a good team and you can lose your driver. Or watch helplessly as you watch the former world champion die the following season. During a race, if a bad accident happens it'll throw a red flag. You can repair your car here (also making the $3 reliability upgrade redundant) so you kinda sometimes want someone to get hurt to look after the cars better. Because you can't repair parts outside of races. Dead drivers are replaced by often better ones too. Meaning that in some cases you might want to kill a driver and get a better one as a replacement. Which is very very silly.
Now you know how the game works let me detail my experience of 3 years. I decided to race as Vernier, the 8th best team in the game. I wanted to enjoy slowly building up like I do in most of these games rather than picking one of the big boys. Here are how my years went;
1970 - Get kerb stomped by the AI. Finished 9th of 10. Often 2/3 laps down.
1971 - Have a fascinating battle in the upper midfield. Finish a best of 3rd behind the Chapmans and Ezzolini's who always were 1 lap ahead.
1972 - Kerb stomp with 9 of 10 wins, winning both WDC and Teams in the same season.
I wasn't even tryharding, I was just playing the game. No "gamers optimise the fun out of the game" here. I just played it. Once I learned the mechanics it was just a case of use money - build new parts - race - win. There are no difficulty sliders in this game. So.. its not hard to beat. I have no desire to play more because its just too easy, and there's no personality.
One personally annoying aspect is that the points system ingame is based on the modern F1 (25-18-15...) rather than the 9-6-4-3-2-1 of the era. The Fastest Lap also grants 1 point, which refers to the games Golden Lap name.
The games own description here states "Golden Lap offers a unique experience in the motorsport management genre" and I can only say that applies to the driver deaths. But that is so minimally done that it fails in the execution of its truly unique property. Drivers die... and so what? "Circus goes on". You have little reason to care someone dies because there is no reminder of who they are. The game doesn't remind you "Those we lost this year" or "last time we raced here, we lost...". Its minimalist approach to style and design also goes to what should be a hard hitting reminder of the Golden era.
TL;DR: Game is very basic, dumbed down of the Motorsport Manager 3 & 4 Mobile games, at a higher price level. Far too easy to win and lacks any depth out of 'Make Numbers Go Higher'. Game has very few problems with this gameloop, and has nice minimalist feel. Positive in that what is here works and I got a few hours enjoyment. Negative that is lacks compared to alternatives and very little reason to replay once you beat it.