YouUntil the last few races, in which Ferrari and McLaren have emerged as contenders, Formula One has been stuck in a stultifying rut due to the total dominance of Red Bull and Max Verstappen. Fortunately, there is a way to rewrite F1 history: the annual officially licensed F1 game, developed by Codemasters and published by EA Sports.
This year’s version gives Formula One fans their best chance yet to liberate the sport from Verstappen’s hegemony: it’s the first F1 game to let you follow a full, multi-season career as any of the 20 drivers. current real life. Finally, avid fans can, through sheer driving skill, unseat Verstappen while enhancing the reputation of their favorite driver. I decided to play as Alex Albon, one of the nicest guys in F1 (who also has one of the weakest teammates – the game rewards you for winning these types of rivalries) and, by lowering the difficulty levels, my version of Albon He has already climbed to the top step of the podium, even with an uncompetitive Williams.
To suit drivers, Codemasters has cleverly rethought and improved the main career mode, making it more of a role-playing exercise than ever, where everything you do on the track is integrated into an overall driver rating. If you do it right, other teams will secretly approach you for exploratory meetings, but if word gets out, you’ll lose the trust of your current team.
You can follow multiple simultaneous races in F1 24: you can still play as yourself and you can follow a joint two-player race with a friend, either competitively or cooperatively. Even the game’s old challenge mode, in which you pursue specific objectives in vignettes of grand prizes ancient and modern, has been transformed into a full-fledged race, albeit a less time-consuming and more urgent one, designed to be dipped into regularly.
Some brave changes to the game’s underlying physics (particularly the tire and suspension models) have made F1 24 cars more realistic than ever – you now have to spend as much time looking after the tires as real drivers do. The continued presence of the loot box-driven arcade-style F1 World mode will remain divisive, but at least it exists in a silo if the thought of paying even more than the £59.95 asking price makes you want to vomit.
F1 24 is really about how its clever incorporation of real drivers in career mode offers endless possibilities, just as the real sport is expected to do for the rest of this season and beyond.
