F1 24 review - All sparks, no drive

The more I play F1 24, the more I can liken it to the current season of the racing sport. It’s back on our screens, and the situation sparks deja vu of last year, right down the Verstappen gapping the pack within a couple of laps. Sadly, just like the sport, the yearly instalment is starting to tire, and F1 24 is the biggest sign of that so far.

Fitted with an expanded Driver Career mode, there’s a small incentive in F1 24 that’s likely to intrigue the most die-hard of fans, and small tweaks to the car’s handling physics are certainly welcome. However, if you already own any of Codemaster’s racers from the last couple of years, then this one might finally be the year to retire from EA’s rat race.

Take the wheel

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As described in my preview of F1 24, Driver Career is an expansion on the MyTeam Career mode that came before it. Instead of creating your own character to develop over the course of several seasons, you can now choose one of the twenty existing drivers on the grid to embody.

Outside of the adjustable difficulty sliders, this immediate choice almost acts as a difficulty slider in itself, as you’ll also take on the respective performance of the team you join. In my playthrough, I enrolled with McLaren, with my main competitors ending up being Ferrari and Mercedes as we contest for second place in the Constructors Championship.

The character models have all seen noticeable improvements this year, thanks to new digital scans that have been taken of everyone in the paddock. Their animations are still a little stiff, but when viewed as idle models in the menus, it’s a big step up from last year. Given how much time we spend with the drivers now, it’s a detail that’s regularly noticed.

Drivers have also been more fully realised with the introduction of voice lines taken from real races over the last several years. Earn a hard-fought victory as Lewis Hamilton, and you’ll likely hear him congratulate the team and everyone back at the factory. Spin out as Carlos Sainz, and you might hear a scream of frustration cherry-picked from some point in his career. It all helps to sell a more authentic F1 experience, even if they appear in limited quantities. I’d have loved to have heard more of them during the race, instead of predominantly as you cross the finish line.

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Choosing an existing driver isn’t just a cosmetic change in F1 24. There are also a few new gameplay additions in the form of racing specialists and secret meetings. Before each race weekend, you can meet with a selection of experts who will set you challenges for the next few days of racing. Your QA specialist might ask you to complete at least 45 seconds of racing in 4th gear, or a certain amount of time with the DRS wing open.

Completing these challenges gives you something else to work towards on race weekends, and I found myself much more likely to take part in practice sessions because of them. The rewards all feed into the development of your car, which contributes to a fabricated rivalry with your teammate. There are only so many development resources to go around, and your ability to influence where those resources go depends on your performance in comparison to the opposite driver.

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To add even more drama to the situation, secret meetings now let you undertake sleuth conversations with rival teams that might want to snap you up. This opens up the possibility to move to other teams in future seasons and makes the mode feel like you’re much more of a driver than a team boss, which is the case for the traditional MyTeam mode.

There’s quite a lot that Driver Career does to elevate the single-player experience of the F1 games forward. I certainly found that there was a lot more to think about that kept me engaged off the track, as well as during race weekends. That said, if the Career mode isn’t something you normally engage with, it’s not going to do anything to change your mind about the format.

Small corrections

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Outside of Driver Career, F1 24 feels extremely familiar to last year’s game. F1 World returns, and houses most of the game’s alternative modes of play. Custom Grand Prix, Time Trials, and multiplayer events are all housed here, with everything you do contributing to the development of a baseline car to compete with online.

All the customisation you could want is here too, with adjustable character models, race suits, helmets, and car liveries. Sadly, the rate at which you unlock new items in the Podium Pass is painfully slow, with much of it pushing you towards forking out for that game’s microtransactions. Thankfully, this is all cosmetic, and you can get away without spending a penny at all if you set aside any desire for vanity.

On the track, Codemasters boasts that a fair amount of work has gone into tweaking things under the hood. New suspension kinematics, improved tyre models, better aerodynamic simulation - it’s clear that the team has put a lot of work into making the cars feel more accurate than ever this year, and I’m sure that seasoned professionals of these games will be able to tell the difference.

I won’t pretend to be an expert in how these changes directly affect racing, but as a more casual fan, the driving certainly feels just as satisfying as ever to perform. More so than before, it feels decidedly more obvious when there’s temperature in the tyres, and you’ll need to put in the work if you want to get your car driving optimally.

I played with a mixture of medium assists and a few turned completely off. With that setup, cars feel glued to the tarmac at high speed, with delicate care needed on both the brake and throttle when navigating tight corners. One overindulgence on the accelerator or a slight clip of a sausage curb, and it’s lights out and away we go to the back of the pack.

The Verdict

If you’re a hardcore fan of the F1 series, you might appreciate the work that’s gone into refining the driving physics to a tee. The same goes for the Driver Career mode, which elevates MyTeam to a new level, even if it feels remarkably familiar all the same.

More casual players of the series who just want to experience the racing on offer will find much less to write home about in F1 24. To an unseasoned eye, the experience here is largely similar to last year’s offering, with one track fewer and sans the continuation of Braking Point, which is a bi-annual affair. As such, F1 24 is a mid-season refresh, and a much harder sell than usual with this yearly release.

3/5

Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.