F1 22 Game Review – Keeping Up with the Real World

Formula One has placed itself firmly in the spotlight this season, with new technical specifications producing beautiful cars that compete much more closely than in recent years. An emerging rivalry between Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, and a calendar filled with more racing than ever, has led to one of the most exciting years in a long time. There have not been so many drastic changes to the video game link yet, but one in particular would have been better off if it had never happened.

We’ll get to F1 Life in a moment, but other than that, F1 22 introduces an impressive range of tweaks and improvements. The new regulations meant that Codemasters had to put in considerable unseen technical work: this year’s cars used larger wheels fitted with lower profile tires, which meant that the game’s tire model – from which much of the cars’ feel came – had to be completely redone.

This is proof of the developer’s technical skill that when you play F1 22, it does not at all feel as if one of its core elements has been ripped out and replaced. Instead, you immediately feel the difference between this year’s cars and last year’s; they are heavier and infinitely slower as a result, but also feel more planted, with more mechanical grip and, like their real counterparts, less likely to slip and slip when encountered in the slipstream of the car. They feel like how you would imagine the actual cars do: par excellence race.

F1 enthusiasts will welcome the changes, but they will probably look with great contempt at F1 22’s most important new element. F1 Life was introduced as a way to give you a taste of the lavish lifestyle of a Formula One driver. It gives you a fancy virtual apartment that you can decorate with expensive furniture and decorations, and lets you buy virtual clothes and accessories, made by real brands, for your driver’s avatar.

This is exactly the kind of thing doomed people predicted would be introduced to the game after EA bought Codemasters last year, but in reality it could be worse. At the very least, it does not subject you to lottery boxes that contain random items: instead, it introduces a currency called Pitcoin, which you can buy with real money. Sure, the game rewards regular play by giving you Pitcoin for free, but unless you’re the kind of person who spends half of your waking hours flipping through Instagram feeds, you’ll probably consider it a cynical way to microtransactions to a full-price race.

The good news is that F1 Life has no impact on single player content at all, it’s really just cosmetics to show off in the online lobby, so if you do not care about it all, you will hardly know it exists. It’s all very distasteful, but if it’s the thin tip of a wedge that needs to be widened in subsequent years, it’s easy to ignore at the moment.

Away from F1 Life, the general background level of realism has been raised, with in-between-the-action interludes impressively mimicking Sky’s F1 coverage. Small but significant racing adjustments abound, such as judicious reworking of the test programs that earn you points for spending on upgrading your car – the track acclimatization program has been visually enhanced, and in the fuel management program, clever new graphics show how light your right foot is.

In the real world, three lanes have been slightly reconfigured for this season, and those changes are repeated in F1 22, which also includes the new Miami lane. New timing mini-games help you get the perfect start and pit stops, and the My Team mode, which introduces a team management aspect by introducing you as a manager and team owner, now has three potential access points: Newcomer, in which you start from scratch; Challenger, in which you take over an established midfield team; and Front Runner, which instantly puts you in a top team. This is a clever way to subtly change the type of game My Team offers.

There are plenty of challenges and time trials – you can even launch the two official safety cars in the latter – and provision has been made for racing game beginners with a new AI mode that basically blunts the skills of the riders you are competing against. On the other end of the scale, the F1 22 feels impressively simulator-like when you turn off the driver aids, especially given that it’s lush in graphical terms. However, there is no story mode this year. Codemasters promises it will return next year, but few, we suspect, will miss it so much.

Online, players with different consoles made by the same manufacturer can compete against each other, and Codemasters hopes to bring full cross-platform online play to launch via an update. On top of that, this is the first F1 game that can be played on a VR headset. Fortunately, however, Codemasters did not repeat the ‘brownfish’ noisy bounce that hit some of this year’s cars, which would have caused nausea in combination with VR.

As we expected from Codemasters, F1 22 is a fantastic game – as a pure mainstream racing game it is at least as good as anything else out there. F1 fans will love his portrayal of this year’s cars and for many it should only justify the purchase of this year’s repeat. It is unfortunate, however, that EA’s fierce desire to introduce microtransactions to all of its games has even gone through in this venerable and beautifully crafted franchise.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (revised), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X / S and PC
Price: £ 59.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: Codemasters
Release date: 1 July 2022
Age rating: 3