The 21st Century has seen the longest stretches of team domination in the history of Formula 1. The last 14 years has seen drivers from just two teams win the whole shebang. That’s year after year, for nearly a decade and a half. Yes, Formula 1 is foremost an engineering series, and the recipe for winning a World Drivers’ Championship essentially begins with “have the quickest car” and ends with “be faster than your teammate.” Yes, there’s a glimmer of promise this year with four different winners in just eight Grands Prix.
However, broadly speaking, the predictability of F1 is getting a little old hat. Unfortunately, Codemasters’ F1 series is suffering a parallel predictability problem in F1 24, in that it’s a terrific racing game but, despite its well-executed new career mode and flattering handling model, it’s mostly an extremely familiar experience.
F1 24’s new hook is the ability to “be one of the 20,” as Codemasters puts it. This means we can now take one of F1’s superstar drivers and play as them in a complete, multi-season career mode experience called Driver Career. It’s essentially an adjacent mode to My Team, the team owner-driver mode added in F1 2020 – which still exists, unchanged, in F1 24. Driver Career isn’t actually limited to the 20 current top F1 drivers – you can also select an F2 driver, create a custom driver, choose from a selection of past F1 legends, or race as Pastor Maldonado.
Driver Career is mostly distinct for what it prunes out: things like team finances, sponsorships, and second driver signing. That helps it focus strictly on the experience of a single driver rather than someone who also needs to sign all the invoices as team boss.
The battle to build your driver’s reputation within the sport and emerge ahead in key rivalries against peers is a compelling one.
So that’s actually a very welcome change, and all these Driver Career features are also available in the two-player career mode. The big picture view of My Team was engaging for a spell, but given that it’s been the same thing annually for several years now, streamlining it to focus a bit more makes sense. Driver Career is a different juggle, and the battle to build your driver’s reputation within the sport and emerge ahead in key rivalries against peers is a compelling one. Pumping up your driver’s various ratings is a satisfying slow burn. Adding new achievements to a real driver’s existing career stats is cute. And yeah, the ability to put Mark Webber back into an F1 car and personally take him to victory is the best dad catnip since Tom Cruise put himself back into an F-14.
Unfortunately, like Tom Cruise in that F-14 with no nosewheel, it just doesn’t all quite land impeccably.
Secret Equation
Most disappointing are the new mid-race objectives. In theory, they’re a brilliant idea to spice up the racing on track. Something to add some urgency or tension to certain phases of a race, a mini-mission could be a smart way to keep us motivated in the midst of the wider contest. But to pull that off they’d need some kind of situational awareness of the race we’re driving in, and as it is they’re generally just too arbitrary and random. Yes, if you’re driving a little sloppy, there’s merit in the race engineer encouraging you to stick to the track limits for a specified number of laps, and then rewarding you for doing so. But in practice, too often your objectives just seem to be pulled from a bucket like we’re playing F1 bingo.
It’s a little daft, for instance, for your race engineer to be wringing his hands about your fuel burn rate and asking you to back off and drive more efficiently when the HUD clearly indicates you have more than enough to complete the race and then pour the remainder over your manager like Gatorade to celebrate. And F1 24 seems to know its objectives are dumb because there was never any punishment for failing; I would just give it the finger and continue to push as hard as possible, the objective would be flunked, the race engineer would shrug it off, and I… would still finish the race with fuel to spare, like I told you. Overall, mid-race objectives just aren’t as tailored to what’s actually going on as they need to be in order to matter or make things more interesting.
Secret meetings are a bit wonky, also. I appreciate they’re designed to emulate the behind-closed-doors nature of surprise driver moves, but it’s a little confusing that turning down so-called secret offers from rival teams made my existing team at McLaren pleased – like Zak Brown was hiding behind the curtains all along.
One of the things I like is the voice bites from the real drivers (which are samples from real F1 radio chatter from past races) but their lines are a lot more limited than I’d hoped. So far, all I’ve really heard is short grabs after crossing the finish line, and dismay at some terminal crashes (which aren’t always looking great this year, with loose wheels consistently clipping through cars while flapping around on their tethers, or behaving in other weird ways). Each driver has a handful, and it’s neat to hear Daniel Ricciardo repeat his iconic “I never left” ultimatum from Monza 2021, or the moments of joy that have been repurposed for drivers like Logan Sargeant or Pierre Gasly. However, drivers are otherwise silent throughout races – they don’t gripe, react, or acknowledge the radio at all – so it’s a little vanilla.
The one-size-fits-all commentary segments continue to be rather basic, also. It’d just be nice for the library of commentary to have some lines prepared for juicy championship scenarios. For instance, I entered the final race in my first season with Oscar Piastri a single point ahead of Max Verstappen: It was winner take all. All F1 24 had in the can for the occasion were some boilerplate remarks about how drivers who’d had a dud season can approach the last GP before the winter break. I understand Codemasters and their EA corporate overlords can’t be expected to be prepared for every single scenario that our actions will create throughout our F1 24 careers, especially if I decide to get weird with it, but a championship going down to the last race is pretty low-hanging fruit, surely?
F1 World is back from F1 23, but I’m no more enamoured by it. I just don’t care about clothes and cosmetics, and I’m not really motivated by game modes that feel more like jobs. F1 World is admittedly harmless if, like me, all you’ll ever do is dip in for quick custom solo races and leave, but there’s nothing about grinding away for car upgrades and Battle Pass tat that appeals to me over the conventional but authentic solo career modes. Multiplayer seems akin to F1 23, and public lobbies will invariably still be like trying to host an egg and spoon race in the middle of a rugby match. Leagues remain a private alternative for civilised groups of like-minded players to compete.
By the way, I should also add I was definitely lulled into a false sense of optimism by F1 24’s fabulous reveal trailer. There’s no rock here in F1 24 itself; just a spray of electronic music from an avalanche of artists I’ve never heard of.
Smooth Operator
So let’s get down to where the rubber meets the road. F1 23’s handling was a lot more stable than F1 22, and to its credit F1 24 is even more so. In the lead-up to F1 24’s release, Codemasters discussed a raft of changes that had been made to the handling model. On paper there were a lot, but the upshot of these changes are sticky, compliant cars that are surprisingly simple to tame and get great drive out of corners. I anticipate there’ll be resistance from some who argue that a less-punishing handling model is less realistic, but what I won’t do is pretend I have any meaningful insight into what an F1 car feels like at maximum attack. Yes, they hold the road like glue in F1 24. Considering that, at high speed, F1 cars essentially have the weight of half-a-dozen pianos pressing them down onto the asphalt, who am I to say that feeling of immense grip is not credible? At any rate, I like the handling in this video game. I feel quick and confident and can drive extremely aggressively. I feel like an F1 driver who knows what he’s doing, at least, and that is the entire point of this quote-unquote-simulation. Like F1 23, it’s especially impressive on a gamepad, even relative to a wheel, where it is a bit twitchier by default.
Also like previous F1 instalments, the AI speed remains highly tuneable. It shouldn’t be glossed over how important it is to the atmosphere of F1 racing to ensure the margin between you and the AI is super tight, regardless of your skill level, and it’s a great feeling once you do find that perfect spot on the difficulty slider. If all racing games could be finessed this way, the genre would be a lot better off.
Whether this refreshed handling and the new Driver Career mode is enough to justify upgrading from F1 23, 22, 2021, and so on, however, is your call. There are other items of note that might tip the scale: There’s a spin-off of the new Driver Career called Challenge Career, which is a curated, episodic version with a pre-determined driver (Verstappen, for now). It’s played solo, but you’ll compete with others asynchronously for leaderboard placement. It’s currently only just started, but I doubt I’ll want to play both this and my existing Driver Career. I’d rather begin a second save as a driver I actually want to race as.
To finish on a high note, F1 24 is the best-looking F1 game to date and, unlike EA Sports WRC, it remains on Codemasters’ proprietary engine where performance is totally reliable. Year over year there have been noticeable improvements to the driver likenesses. Bottas’ luxurious mullet and moustache combo is lovingly rendered, solidifying the fan-favourite Finn as the most Australian-adjacent F1 driver amongst a grid that features 10% actual Australians. Coming in after that, Spa, Silverstone, Jeddah, and Lusail have received updates to bring them up to snuff with the current real-life circuits (though Circuit Paul Ricard hasn’t made the final cut, so F1 24 has 25 tracks to F1 23’s 26).
And no, there’s no Braking Point story mode this year. As a reminder, that’s only been appearing in every other F1 game since 2021, so the next chapter of that isn’t part of F1 24.