Of all the franchises in EA Sports’ stable, the recently acquired F1 series is the most fascinating. It’s not just that it’s visually stunning and pleasingly realistic, it’s also the official game for Formula One’s esports world championship, which means there’s a clear and tangible pathway between your bedroom and the headquarters of Red Bull Racing. Seriously.
Few games have a greater skill set correlation to their real-life counterparts than the F1 series. Many professional esports competitors, as The Athletic found out in 2021, are actually skilled drivers who lacked the financial support to progress in the sport. And when Max Verstappen had a go on the gaming rigs at Red Bull, he laid down times that would have proved very competitive in professional esports.
Being good at FIFA 2022 does not mean that you’re good at football. Being good at F1 2022 though…
All of which renders a traditional review rather redundant. F1 2022 is obviously brilliant. But it’s brilliant in several ways, largely because you can turn it into whatever sort of F1 game you desire.
If you want an old-school pick-up-and-play arcade racer suitable for complete newbies, children or post-pub entertainment, F1 2022 has a casual mode, a split-screen option and enough driving aids to provide almost universally accessible fun.
If, however, you want a fully immersive and faithful replication of the F1 season complete with three full-length practice sessions, full qualifying and full-length races, complete car customisation, realistic tyre degradation and strategic options all the way up to delaying a pit stop in the hope of getting a cheap one through a surprise safety car, it can be that game, too.
Every aspect of the game can be customised. Don’t like safety cars towards the end of important races, Sir Lewis? Well, switch them off! Struggling to keep the car on the track, Mr Mazepin? Activate your braking and steering aids and you’ll never kiss the tyre wall again.
You can, if you so wish, make your car invincible or you can make it so realistic that aggressively thundering over the kerbs for 20 laps will damage your underbody and gradually reduce performance.
As for the racing itself, it should be enough to say that it is so realistic it will actually enhance your enjoyment of the sport because when you know a track on the game, you feel like you know it in real life.
This is why, when Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton had their little coming-together at Silverstone in 2021, I felt compelled to nod vigorously along to Red Bull boss Christian Horner’s subsequent contention that “you don’t stick a wheel up the inside at Copse!”
I did not have these opinions before I played this game.
But for those of us who have played it in the past and know all of this, what’s changed and is it enough to justify the price (£50-55)?
As with Football Manager, a common complaint with EA Sports’ output is, “Well, that’s a hell of a lot of money to pay for a data update”. And as with Football Manager, the complaint isn’t always entirely fair.
It is certainly true that if you haven’t played since, say, F1 2020, you would not struggle to negotiate your way around F1 2022. The interface is largely the same, the graphics are mostly the same and the controls are exactly the same. The only major visual differences are the colours and relative strengths of the cars.
The sport itself has changed, however, and the game has changed with it. Sprint races are now a feature, there’s a debut for the Miami circuit and the changes to the tracks in Spain, Australia and notorious controversy spawn point Abu Dhabi have all been faithfully replicated.
There are some tweaks to other elements of the game — visits to the pits can now be either a timing-based mini-game or a chance to catch your breath and dry your palms as the computer takes over and you watch broadcast-style coverage of the stop. You can win yourself sports cars and drive them around the tracks — though given the massive performance gap between an F1 car and your average sports car, this just feels like driving a 1988 Volvo 240 around Monza.
And then there’s the new F1 Life where you can, for reasons that escape the understanding of someone as old as me, dress up your little driver in a variety of hats and t-shirts and pick out furniture for their virtual tax haven. I don’t get it, but I’m sure someone will.
The biggest changes, however, are under the hood where the physics of the cars have been overhauled to reflect, among other things, the 2022 season’s regulatory changes. This means more noticeable effects from tweaks to aerodynamics and an increased sense of realism when it comes to tyres.
EA Sports has supplied a video that explains all of this far better than I ever could, but essentially, the better you are at this game, the more you’ll notice the changes. For the professional esports racer, this is likely to be a seismic shift in the mechanics of the game. The casual player will barely notice.
Across the 300 or so laps driven for the purposes of this review, these changes are all about the tyres. A set of cold hards now make you feel like you’re trying to compete in a sports day in your school shoes, something that wasn’t always the case in past versions. Slip on a pair of softs for the last 15 laps and you’ll really notice the difference, especially in the last couple of laps when you’ve worn them down and the grip falls away.
And that’s where this game wins. The F1 series’ greatest strength is that it replicates the tactical side of the sport as well as it replicates the racing side.
The moment you really understand Formula 1 is the moment when you realise that the drivers aren’t necessarily going as fast as they can all the time. It’s when you put together everything you’ve learned about tyre degradation, fuel management, ERS, DRS, dirty air and clean air and all of that knowledge coalesces into a basic understanding of a sport that is an ever-changing, volatile mix of driver competence, car performance and lots and lots of tactics.
It’s not just about cars going round in circles and occasionally crashing. It’s about keeping your powder dry, building up your energy reserves and stalking the car in front for lap after lap before you finally pounce. Or it’s about reducing your pace, protecting your tyres and bringing the car home.
That’s what this game does: it turns 53 virtual laps of Silverstone into a test of strategy as well as dexterity. It’ll have you nervously adjusting your sweaty grip as you try to calculate just how long it will be before Carlos Sainz is in DRS range. And, in my case, it’ll have you smearing your front wing across the wall because you were focused too much on the maths and not enough on the physics.
There may very well be a clear and tangible pathway between your bedroom and the Red Bull Headquarters. Alas, there is not going to be one for me.
Editor’s Note: This review was conducted with a standard controller on a Playstation 4 with a pre-release version of the game. Screenshots are courtesy of EA Sports and may not reflect your graphic capabilities.
To get more stories like this delivered to your feed, follow our Gaming vertical: theathletic.com/gaming
