Unlike the long-standing Formula 1 racing series developed by Codemasters and Electronic Arts, “F1 Manager 22” puts you in the shoes of a Formula 1 team boss, controlling every aspect of your team from staff to budgets to car. development to in-race strategy. Sounds like a lot? That’s because it is, and the sheer scope of the game is both a blessing and a curse: hardcore Formula 1 fans will lose themselves in the seemingly limitless options of team management, while newcomers to the sport may be put off by the steep learning curve. .
The overall structure of the game is deceptively simple. “Career” is the only gameplay mode available, which allows you to control one of the 10 existing Formula 1 teams and play as many seasons as you want. You can pursue instant success by picking front-runners Ferrari or Red Bull, or pick a struggling team like Williams and try to bring it back to glory.
Once you’ve chosen your team, you’ll be introduced to your headquarters, a central hub with menus that allow you to view all kinds of information and make various upgrades and decisions. Visually it can be a bit overwhelming, and, as with many management games, the controls are best suited for a mouse and keyboard, although Frontier did an admirable job of making the console controls as intuitive as possible (I played on PS5 and felt comfortable with it after a few races).
As a team leader, the options you have at your disposal are enormous from the start. You can research new additions for your cars, make spare parts, build new facilities, scout emerging drivers and even scout opponents’ employees. The level of detail and accuracy here is phenomenal: each team’s actual staff is on hand, including engineers, technical chiefs and heads of aerodynamics.
From the main hub you can also check your in-game email, where the game tries to steer you (no pun intended) in the right direction by making suggestions on what your next moves should be. The tutorials at the beginning are helpful, though much remains unexplained, and you’ll probably spend a good deal of time first familiarizing yourself with the menus and going back and forth to get the status bonuses of various car and facility upgrades. to compare.
Simply put, there’s a lot to take in, and you have to be willing to do some reading.
After you’ve made your preparations, you’ll start the second phase of “F1 Manager 22”, and without a doubt the pinnacle of the game: a Grand Prix weekend. By closely following this year’s season of 22 races, starting in Bahrain and ending in Abu Dhabi, you’ll guide your drivers through each practice and qualifying session (or simulate them, if you want to speed things up) as you customize the cars. based on your drivers’ feedback.
The races themselves are a hit. With commentary from Sky Sports announcers David Croft and Karun Chandhok – and with surprisingly good graphics, especially for a management sim – you oversee all aspects of the race, juggle multiple plates as you determine pit stop strategies for both drivers, tell them how aggressive you are need to race, when to deploy ERS (a battery charge that essentially increases the pace) and how much fuel to use. You can watch the races from multiple cinematic camera angles based on your two drivers, and the overall presentation is solid.
I found the majority of the races completely engrossed and, to my surprise, even more exciting than most real racing games. With two cars in play, you’re almost always guaranteed to be in at least a few dramatic scenarios, providing true entertainment on the edge of your seat. There’s simply nothing more fun than changing your strategy in an instant and leading your driver into incredible overtaking on the last lap to achieve a top-10 finish.
You can choose to accelerate the races to 16 times normal speed, although I rarely did that in case I missed an important moment.
That said, there is still room for improvement. AI opponents hardly deviate from the recommended strategies, making it easy to predict what they will do. Safety cars and crashes seem to be a rarity – in fact I only encountered one safety car in my first eight races, which is incredibly low for Formula 1. And the otherwise nice graphics are laughably bad during crash replays: animations are jittery and cars will awkwardly turning against walls with no apparent visual damage. It’s almost impossible to tell how badly a car crashed based on those poor visual cues.
Once each race is over, head back to HQ, where you’ll be inundated with a healthy dose of emails and new suggested tasks as you prepare for the next race. Midway through my first season, the novelty of these emails started to wear off, and it started to feel like real work to answer them. Among other things, you order spare parts, vote on the rules for the next season and build recommended facilities. Towards the end of the season, I wished I could turn on my absence and go on vacation.
As you progress into a new season, drivers switch teams, engineers may retire, and you’ll have to start tweaking your car’s design to include new features. It can be immensely satisfying to slowly reach your long-term goals (I never thought I’d be so excited to improve my “dirty air turns”), even if the boredom of the off-track action remains.
Be prepared to put some time into this game: each race weekend can easily take over an hour to play, and a full season can take you anywhere from 12 to 25 hours. There is a lot of content here to keep you busy.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel that the game had additional gameplay modes to spice things up and make it more accessible to casual fans. A quick-play option to call strategy during a one-off race weekend – on one of Formula 1’s global circuits – would have been a great addition, rather than having to follow the actual race schedule via career mode. It would also have been nice to create your own team from scratch, a feature available in the Codemasters series. And there are no multiplayer options at all, which is a real shame as I’d love to compete with some of my friends (especially since the AI tends to be so vanilla).
So, who should be playing this game? It is clear that Formula 1 fanatics will love it – there is no doubt about it. However, it’s harder to sell for casual fans who might just be getting into the sport. Hopefully “F1 Manager 22” can serve as the foundation of an annual series, and future iterations can build on this promising start to flesh out more game modes and increase its appeal.
As it stands, “F1 Manager 22” can be an incredibly fun and engaging game – keep in mind that you really need to put in some work to get the most out of it.
Gregory Leporati is a freelance writer and photographer covering esports, technology and motorsports. His recent work has appeared in GQ, the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork and Ars Technica. Follow him on Twitter @leporparty.
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