Codemasters ventures into the next generation of Formula 1 and is forced to do many things differently than its predecessor. This has advantages and disadvantages.
A new year, a new F1 game from Codemasters. Routine, you might think. But far from it! While the last installments focused more on cautious optimisation, EA Sports F1 22 delivers a whole slew of significant innovations. However, this is not so much due to the developers” innovation mania but rather to the real Formula 1, which has been running with new technical regulations since this year”s season, resulting in completely overhauled cars.
Codemasters had to incorporate these cars and their new driving characteristics into the game with great attention to detail. But of course, the English studio came up with even more improvements that were implemented in F1 2022. The result: the most atmospheric F1 simulation to date, whose biggest flaw, however, lies in the driving behaviour of all things.
In my test I analyse for you which innovations are actually a gain and for whom the upgrade to the new F1 version is worthwhile.
Table of Contents
F1 Life? (No)problem!
None of the new features has caused as much discussion in advance as F1 Life, the game”s new social hub. This is your digital racing loft, which you can even decorate. You can also customise your avatar here, including your racing overalls, winning pose and other details, so that you can greet your guests appropriately dressed. In the offline game, these are simply AI characters, but with an active online connection, your friends can also drop by.
Sounds like The Sims, plays a bit like it, but fortunately it is much less annoying than feared. If you like, you can more or less ignore F1 Life. For your career, wearing stylish sunglasses and fancy brand jumpers is completely irrelevant, since you create a separate driver here anyway. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – I spent a thoroughly entertaining ten minutes colouring in the racing overalls, choosing a living room wall and matching it with the matching carpet.
One of my eyebrows raises critically, though, because as you might expect, microtransactions have been built into F1 Life. If you want, you can buy glasses, trousers, tops and more from well-known brand manufacturers for so-called Pitcoins, and you only get them for invested real money. However, this does not unlock any gameplay advantages, which is why we refrain from devaluing the game according to our Pay2Win guidelines. My recommendation: Just ignore the stuff and show Codemasters how superfluous the purchasable branded gear is.
A far more fun and useful component of F1 Life are the new supercars. Yes, you don”t really need them in an F1 game, but for one thing they can only be bought with in-game currency, which you get as you progress through the game. On the other hand, they are really great for entertaining laps on the well-known Formula 1 tracks. If you like, you can even get into the official safety cars and feel like Bernd Mayländer.
A real atmosphere board
Let”s get to the great strength of F1 2022: the atmosphere on, on and off the track is insane! Codemasters has once again managed to portray the top class of motorsport in a highly authentic way. This is ensured above all by the improved cutscenes and camera angles, which are based on the real TV broadcast.
If you want, you can now take on even more racing tasks than ever before, such as the correct positioning of the car at the end of the formation lap or the ideal approach to the pits, which is solved by a simple but atmospheric quicktime event.
Starting this year, F1 22 will be greeted by the well-known voice of Sky presenter Sascha Roos, who chats in the best Sunday afternoon manner about the most important facts about the racetrack.
The countless loving details also make my fan”s heart beat faster: On the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montréal, for example, there are numerous leaves lying off the racing line, as you would expect from reality, because the strong wind blows the leaves onto the Canadian track. The interviews and podium ceremonies could be straight out of TV and give me the wonderful feeling of being a real F1 driver in the middle of the racing circus.
Thanks to the new VR support, you can now also look around freely in the cockpit while driving, provided you have the appropriate glasses. This helps enormously, especially when looking into the side mirrors, which are still a little impractical, and increases the atmosphere even more. The following VR glasses are officially supported:
- Valve Index
- Oculus Quest 2
- Oculus Rift S
- HTC Vive
- HTC Vive Cosmos
No revolution on the tech front
Optically, F1 22 can score points compared to its predecessor with improved lighting and prettier asphalt textures. Especially the rain races are again a visual highlight. Even with ray tracing activated for even more realistic shadows and lighting, the game cannot keep up with genre greats like Forza Horizon 5 or Gran Turismo 7 however. Technically, the game ran smoothly at all times on the test systems (Xbox Series X and high-end PC) and did not cause any problems.
The AI also does its job pleasingly competently. The opponents overtake aggressively, even dare to poke into a gap, but actively avoid damage to the car and pull back again in case of doubt. If a crash does occur, however, the damage model is only slightly improved, even if somewhat smaller carbon splinters now fly through the air and the underbody can be damaged for the first time.
The best Formula 1 game for beginners so far
Newcomers can look forward to an adaptive AI as a further innovation in F1 22. This automatically adjusts the skill of the opponents to your own skills behind the wheel, and the driving physics are also streamlined and the damage model is deactivated. Is the feature any good?
You can only find out in a self-experiment. That”s why I dragged my wife behind the F1 wheel to see how she got on. Her conclusion after a surprising (but well-deserved!) podium finish in Melbourne: A great idea for people like her who still have trouble with the realistic controls but love Formula 1, or for children who just want to slip into the skin of their idol.
And indeed: the adaptive AI is ideally suited for such purposes and works great. The opponents drive much slower, but without just creeping around the track. With a bit of courage, overtaking manoeuvres are no problem, resulting in a sense of achievement, increasing motivation and learning so that one day, ideally, you will be able to compete in normal mode.
Great scope with a small downer
As is typical for the series, you will once again receive a jam-packed licence package with the purchase of F1 22. All 22 tracks of the season, the ten teams and their 20 drivers are on board. If you don”t want to start your career with one of the established teams, you can put your own team on the grid in My Team mode. Here, for the first time, you can decide whether you want to start as a newcomer, an established midfield team or even a front-runner, which has an effect on the budget.
The sprint races, which are based on real events, will also celebrate their premiere. Other options include single races, time trials and a co-op career that even works locally. However, you will have to do without a story mode this year, as Codemasters simply didn”t have the time for it.
Miami is a new track on the calendar. The rebuilt sections in Melbourne, Barcelona and Abu Dhabi are now also available in the game and other courses have also received a few additional environmental details.
As soon as you sit in the car in the garage and start the weekend, you are greeted by another and, in my opinion, sensible innovation: The training programmes, through which you can access precious development resources, have been streamlined once again.
There are now only three variants: Race pace, tyre use and qualifying simulation. This means that the free practice sessions no longer degenerate into a marathon and we can concentrate more quickly on fine-tuning the car.
Almost too much is wanted in terms of driving behaviour
The new ground effect cars mean that the drivers have to act much more cautiously at the steering wheel, which Codemasters has almost carried over into the game a little too much. When turning in, the cars are still stable, but when accelerating out, more than ever fingertip feeling is required, which is almost a touch too tricky, especially for controller drivers. After all, analogue triggers don”t offer nearly as good feedback as a pedal set.
In the past, it was indispensable to speed over the curbs for an ideal time, but now your car feels like it”s already spinning if you even look at a kerb at an angle. This is due to the fact that the new cars have to be driven much stiffer and lower so that the ground effect can work optimally.
This is understandable, but annoying, especially because the AI avoids the kerbs with almost perfect precision, while we have to change our driving style, which we have trained for years, with a lot of time lost. Codemasters could have toned down the effect a little for the sake of playability, at least until next year.
Codemasters has also gone a bit over the top in simulating the new 18-inch tyres. Almost like back in F1 2013, the steering behaviour occasionally changes so abruptly from one lap to the next that from one moment to the next we can hardly negotiate a corner without problems and smash into something. Particularly annoying: The AI opponents are obviously not bothered by this, because they turn their laps much longer than we do, and without any noticeable loss of time.
We can only hope that Codemasters will make a few adjustments and fine-tune the game in future patches. At the moment, controller users in particular will have a hard time not spinning frequently without warning. And this group is likely to still make up a significant part of the player base.
If you have a steering wheel, you can intercept the cars much better, but the problems with tyre wear remain. On the other hand, the force feedback is once again convincing and, thanks to the low-slung cars, we can feel every bump directly at the wheel. If you want to know whether your steering wheel is supported on the PC, you can find a complete list on the (Website Simracing Setups).
Upgrade yes or no?
Finally, let”s get to the important question that series fans ask every year: Is F1 22 worth the full price even if I own the direct predecessor? This time the answer is easier to give than usual: Yes, you get some successful innovations this year, a completely new track, sensible quality-of-life improvements and of course the completely new generation of cars, which looks wonderfully fresh and is a challenge even for PS veterans.
There is criticism for the debatable F1 Life service as well as the somewhat too ambitious driving physics, which act too unpredictably and thus unbelievably and drove us up the wall from time to time despite years of experience. It is also a pity that there is no story mode, which would have made the racing spectacle even more rounded. With the rules remaining stable, the feature should make its comeback next year at the latest.
Editor”s verdict
I”ve been loyal to the Codemasters series since F1 2010 and not even the truly atrocious F1 2015 managed to change that. But I was particularly looking forward to this year”s spin-off, after all, thanks to the return of the ground effect cars, we could finally hope for a bigger leap than in previous years.
Were my hopes fulfilled? For the most part, yes. The cars are indeed much more challenging to control than their predecessors, but in places almost too unwieldy and unpredictable. Driving a full Grand Prix distance is therefore almost hair-raising, at least when I don”t feel like setting up my steering wheel.
The premiere of the sprint races, Miami as a new track and above all the wonderful staging in the style of a real TV broadcast nevertheless ensure that I have a blast with F1 22. Features like the adaptive AI have also convinced me, because it always makes me happy when my favourite sport becomes accessible to even more people.
Unfortunately, the damage model is still rather lame, despite improvements in detail, and even though last year”s story mode Breaking Point was dripping with clichés, I would have liked a new storyline for the first few hours of the game.
But all in all, this can hardly dampen my enthusiasm: F1 22 is a very good racing game whose rough edges will hopefully be addressed with patches!
