F1 24 game review: They made it easier

These are the kinds of questions that will ultimately determine whether F1 24 is a buy-or-skip entry. And to be frank, it has almost nothing to do with the quality of the game itself. Unlike the outrage drivers on Reddit who compare its graphics to those of a PS3 title, I think F1 24 is as competent as the best Codemasters releases before it. But video games are expensive and annual releases can’t change much. Furthermore, for the 2024 season, the driver duo of each Formula 1 team is exactly the same as last year, so the typical complaint like “it’s just a roster update” is launched Mad, MLB The ShowOr FIFAEast, FC doesn’t even apply here.

F1 24 the biggest changes are to the single player career and driving physics. As soon as I received my review code, I went straight to the campaign that I usually do with these games anyway. Only, this time, I decided not to create my own avatar or select one of the 20 existing pilots but rather to bring an “icon” out of retirement.

New for 24 is the ability to embark on a full career with many of the attributes and management aspects of the series’ long-running My Team mode, only with a real driver and a real team. But Codemasters also lets you play as one of 10 legends of the sport if you want (12 if you buy the $90 Champions Edition), replacing a current competitor. I could have chosen Michael Schumacher or Mark Webber, but when Pastor Maldonado is there, well, what would you do?

And so, I asked everyone’s favorite Venezuelan winner to don the suit once again, ditching Aston’s Lance Stroll to partner Fernando Alonso, simply because the image of them as colleagues work keeps me entertained. In the new Driver Career mode, you set goals for yourself and your performance compared to your teammate. If you do not respect them, your contract will be threatened. Sometimes you will also be approached by other teams for “secret meetings”, where you will have the opportunity to hear them out and negotiate a deal for next season, or walk. I was approached by Williams immediately after my first Grand Prix, understandably down, then surprised to learn that Aston Martin were “happy” that I turned them down. It’s not really a secret, is it?

Overall, however, Driver Career doesn’t deviate much from F1‘s previous solo offerings, which I think is good; Either way, these games have always had the basis of strong championship experience, dating back to the middle of the last decade. You’ll invest in partial improvements between races and maximize development by doing test sessions during practice, which I’ve always thought is a great way to learn the tracks. Not that I had much to learn, as I opted to cut my season down to 10 races and lose weight. The F1 calendar is way too long these days, with too many lame street circuits, and I have no regrets.

My attention then turned to physics, and this is where things get interesting. If you’ve been paying attention to the community dialogue around this game and perhaps seen some preview footage, you may know that the gameplay didn’t look particularly encouraging in the days leading up to launch. Indeed, a pre-patch version of the game that I wasn’t able to try featured a wonky-looking handling model that didn’t at all match the more advanced, supposedly natural dynamics introduced by Codemasters about a year ago. month.

I can’t say how this happened, or what this iteration of the game was like; that’s the problem with evaluating any video game in 2024, knowing full well that your thoughts and impressions may be completely invalidated tomorrow. What I can say is that I’m playing the game now, after the update – with a pad – and more than anything else I’m surprised at how tame the car behavior has become.

The grip floor is certainly higher than before, and the cars are a lot less twitchy in corners than I remember them from back in the day. F1 2020. You can miss your marks, lose traction, take too many turns and possibly lose a little speed, but you will almost always be able to recover, even in the wet. Especially in the wet. That’s the problem: it actually takes a surprising degree of effort to totally lose it on a waterlogged track surface, and it’s almost impossible if you use the minimum amount of traction control. You can drift for days, at least on one pad, and that’s not a satisfying feeling behind the wheel of an F1 car. A turbocharged hot hatch in the snow, sure, but not here.

I’ve heard that handling the wheels might need a bit of work, and I wouldn’t doubt it; I’m also well aware that anything a developer does to make a relatively realistic racing game more accessible to a controller-wielding audience is a direct and pointed affront to control testers. This isn’t really within the scope of this review, but I think the adjustments Codies made here resulted in a driving experience that was a bit too forgiving in the sport’s less forgiving conditions. The good news is, as always, that this can and probably will change in the long term, with the succession of physics fixes that every racing sim receives these days post-launch.

Otherwise, I found there was a lot to like F1 24. I’m happy to say that performance on my PC (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU) was very good, allowing me to average around 70 FPS with full ray tracing and most settings Maximized graphics, using DLSS. Again, I’m very happy that Codemasters is sticking with the Ego engine after the WRCs jerky transition to Unreal.

So the main thing here is a stable experience, perhaps too predictable for anyone who plays these games year after year. But it’s wrong to expect an actor to reinvent an annual franchise like this, and F1 either way, it doesn’t require that kind of reinvention. The work done on the quarry and friendlier handling on the pad will certainly be appreciated by a subset of the fandom. If you think you’re not in this group, consider saving $70. There is always next year or last year.

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