Another year, another year of toxic fandoms bickering about which of the millionaire twinks, Lance Stroll, and the Zaddy will match with them on Grindr. It must be time for F1! F1 25 brings a few new additions to this year’s release over last, and maybe removes something that people really didn’t like. Focused this year around the third chapter in the Braking Point story and upgrades to the My Team offering, alongside showcasing Joseph Kosinski’s upcoming F1: The Movie. F1 25 does a lot right, but a lot of it we’ve seen before.

Building directly off of last year’s release, the teams at Codemasters and EA have decided to remove the whole engine braking thing that notably saw everyone throw their arms up in frustration. The handling was last year’s biggest controversy. Returning (kind of) to 2023’s handling, the cars feel a lot more stable, almost too stable at the rear. While Konnorsport returns to the sport for a fictional tale of 2024-2025, full of drama and a little bit of intrigue. All the while, the majority of the changes come from changing how My Team works in what is called “My Team 2.0.”

From new UI to a change in how you run the team. This year, I thought I’d go with the latest addition to the grid and play as Brad Pitt, because why not? Part Football Manager’s Man Manager on a shallower level to WWE’s GM Mode levels of balancing a budget, you have just enough control with each part of the development to keep it F1-focused, but you also have to fight menus to get through everything between races. Very often, you’ll be pulled to the side like you are in Braking Point to resolve questions of using up time or resources to better improve the performance, standings with fans, and otherwise.

It is no surprise that I enjoy a bit of Codemasters’ F1 games, despite almost every comment online being “it’s not a real simulator.” Yeah, and your dad isn’t real after he left for milk. F1 25 is as good as the best of the last few years, with mostly the same ideas, and that’s the “problem” with it overall. Taking a step back from a misstep in 2024, there are improvements over 2023, but like every yearly release, it is about picking out the details and what you view as worth it to spend that money every year.

Two of the biggest things that are selling F1 25 this year are the latest edition of Braking Point, which sees Konnersport continue to have Drive to Survive-like interviews and highly dramatized action at its forefront, as well as additions to My Team. This year, My Team tries to be as nitty-gritty about the business of running an F1 team in this cost-cap era of Formula racing. If you’re not a fan of the Braking Point story in general, I don’t think this year’s edition will change that opinion, as the smiles still look a bit uncanny, the action is fine, and the plot is as good as you’re going to get with this sort of storytelling.

Building on the success of the team’s 2023 season, the ‘24 season starts strong for Konnersport, putting the challenge to Max and Red Bull. Returning for the 2025 season, though, the focus becomes much clearer. I don’t want to spoil the story for those who are interested. However, other than a few clean-up edits and a bit more racing throughout, I quite enjoyed this third chapter of Braking Point, to the point where I’m interested to see where it goes, presumably in F1 27.

My Team, on the other hand, doesn’t tell a story but does have you similarly being asked by staff, “Dave said an inappropriate joke, should HR explain to all the staff what is and isn’t proper work behavior?” I’ll give the team at Codemasters points for trying, but filling out that world as you try to run a team only does so much to make me care as a player. Broken up into what is effectively four menus, you have the three departments of engineering, personnel, and corporate, with a fourth option of corporate overlord emails and management skill points.

While the previous between-race scheduling thing is also broken up into those four columns, so you can generate interest, improve drivers’ stats, and generally just ignore it. I say ignore it, there is an auto-schedule thing, which is far more useful than fretting over “Oh, do I want to generate more money and take away from productivity?” As I’ve said, this year’s game adds several menus there to expand on the ideas, but it doesn’t feel as streamlined as possible. To open up research, you go to the right three clicks, open engineering, open research, open the highlighted department, and presumably hit the button for suggested research.

As slow as that sounds, that’s the quickest you’ll get into anything in engineering, as that’s also been expanded a bit from last time out, I believe. As was the case previously (I believe last year), you research upgrades for the cars, then you go through development, and now there is a little bit more to that. Typically before, especially if you create your own driver and team, you’d be the boss all the time, so you get preferential treatment. Here, you are effectively a separate entity.

Much like in real life, teams decide who gets the new parts and how development might benefit one driver over the other. This is where facility upgrades come in: Each of the departments (engineering, personnel, and corporate) can have facility upgrades, which means you can research more parts at once, hire more people, and get a bit more money from sponsors. It is all very fine. Initially, my problem isn’t with the layout of these menus or the number of them. They all feed into gameplay in some way, but it is the frequency which department heads ask to speak with you or something that comes up.

A part fails in research, and you need to go through all those button presses and menus to get into it – the same with development. If you’re developing two parts and one fails, you need to redevelop the failure and assign who gets the available part. Every time a department gets an upgrade, there is a bit of fanfare for it, then you need to go into the menu and spend more money expanding the facilities. That’s provided you don’t get stopped from advancing to the next race because contract negotiations are happening, or a sponsor wants a driver to do an advert.

I don’t think it is controversial to say that the gameplay of this racing game is in fact, the driving, because that’s ultimately the point of all of these systems. However, taking 15-20 minutes to fumble through these menus is more of a hassle than it needs to be. When you’re allowed to pick the driver you want to play as for that weekend, when you’re allowed to go driving, F1 25 is great fun. For the most part, anyway, with the “improved” AI sometimes acting like the real drivers: Lance and Liam are slow and useless, and Max acts like Max.

Another “major” addition to this year’s title is the idea of being able to finally race on reverse versions of certain tracks. I won’t complain about that too much; it is a fun idea that lets you experience some favorites in a new light, but only in some modes. While you can (obviously) race reverse tracks in multiplayer or single/season-long Grand Prix through the same menu that you get to Time Trials with, it isn’t an option in career modes. It seems like the pettiest thing to pick at, but when you are given the option to play a custom season, it would be nice to remove tracks you hate and replace them with alternatives.

In the Grand Prix option, you can run custom seasons of any size, including using these reverse tracks, but you still can’t do that with driver and team careers, which is baffling. Be it disliking the track for personal reasons or generally being like a real F1 driver and being terrible (so you hate Monaco), there are tracks people want to pick and choose from. Now, in career mode your options are the full 24 races, 16, or 10 – boo you if you just want to pap off Monaco, Miami, and Shanghai, I guess.

As an idea, I don’t hate reverse tracks, but the way it is implemented seems more like a gimmick than something long-term and worthwhile. I mean, after the whole 2020 business where Austria and Silverstone held two successive Grand Prix, you’d think someone would have thought it would be worthwhile allowing for variations on this. However, much like the inclusion of Portimão the other year, you can’t fire these interesting configurations into the calendar for fun. What I’m saying is, give me the Bahrain outer loop, you cowards!

Otherwise, I’m going to echo that of disparaging comments under every post about F1 games since the dawn of time: it’s practically the same game as before, but a bit shinier. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of a lie. The AI is a bit better at visually battling each other and causing more interesting dynamic moments throughout a race. My comment about everyone but me (I’m a driving god!) being terrible at Monaco is based on qualifying fifth and without a safety car, with two slow stops, and playing at a higher difficulty than I’ve ever played F1 games in my life, I won it comfortably.

Don’t get me started on Driver of the Day for that race: I started fifth and won with a 17-second lead, Verstappen started third and ended up fifth but got the vote for reasons far beyond my comprehension. How dare I have a hobby of on-track overtaking in Monaco, a track that has fine print requiring you to say it is impossible to overtake in these modern F1 cars. The point of that is, the AI is a touch better at on-track battles, even with you a little bit. I won’t say it is perfect, but it is better and more interesting.

Ok, shall we talk about the shiny bit then? Though the baseline of F1 25 is similar, there is a bit of a visual uplift somewhere supposedly, but I won’t lie, I did turn down quite a few graphical settings this year. Playing on a 40 Series RTX graphics card, 32 GB of RAM, and an i7 processor, broadly my system meets or exceeds the recommended system requirements, and even I actively avoided ray tracing this year. In fact, something happened that reset my graphical settings at one point, and everything went straight to ultra. I won’t lie, it was a bit choppy.

On Medium for most settings, I got a mostly stable 60 frames per second with a tiny drop if something graphically intense happened, like baby Italian Jesus having an engine blowout and there being a large crash at the same time. It was rare that there would be a quarter-of-a-second blip under 60, but it was there, and we know how some PC players are when there is a tiny inconvenience. I opted for performance over knowing the driver’s nose hairs are being rendered, and I have had 50 hours of fun so far. Emphasis on “so far,” as I practically dropped F1 24 after the review.

As a game, there are improvements for F1 25 that do make it better than F1 24 and F1 23. However, as I’ve said here and as everyone has always said about yearly releases, it is what you want from the game in the first place that makes it worthwhile. Do you want to just play online? Then yeah, depending on how active your favored version is, F1 25 isn’t going to change the world for you. If you play the career modes several times over, playing a decade each time, then some aspects have been improved but could still go further in future iterations.

Ultimately, F1 25 doesn’t do anything drastically new or refreshing, but with Braking Point hitting a stride in this third chapter and marginal improvements, there is plenty of evidence to say that there is enough that’s exciting. Comparatively, sitting next to the best of the F1 games of the last few years, F1 25 is as fun as it has always been, but only does so much for obvious reasons. Featuring Apex GP is a gimmick, and I can’t say anything about the scenarios set to release next week, but that inclusion does the same as Konnersport. The underline of F1 25 is that it is still fun, albeit with typical improvements of a yearly release.

A PC review copy of F1 25 Iconic Edition was provided by Electronic Arts for this review.

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F1 25

$59.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Braking Point's third chapter.
• Improved on-track battles with AI.
• Reverse configuration tracks.
• LiDAR scan improvements.

Cons

• My Team is a bit more menu-heavy.
• Small, very minor dips below 60 frames per second very rarely.
• Can't include the reverse configuration tracks in Team and Driver career.