I’ve spent a fair amount of time in F1 24 facing backwards before tapping the flashback button. It’s my own fault – I insist on setting the difficulty too hard, doing manual gears and turning the traction control down to the medium setting.
With that previous entry in the series, when mixed with my brick of a right foot, this was a recipe for a fair amount of mistakes, especially on a tricky track that may or may not come with some close barriers ready to punish you for any mistake. Baku, for example, or the ultimate challenge in the form of Monaco – a track set up for the much smaller and nimbler F1 cars of yesteryear, rather than today’s comparative behemoths.
In F1 25, though, based on what I’ve played so far, things have improved. The way I drive now feels like an experience that’s just as much of a wild ride, but doesn’t feel liable to bite you a little too often in ways that don’t quite make sense. In the hands-on laps I did, as well as Spa, Imola, Singapore, Bahrain (and a few others I’ll get into later), nailing the perfect lap was still very tricky, but not because of sudden mid-to-late corner spins that feel impossible to avoid unless you barely touch the throttle.
Instead, I often found myself able to wrestle back control of – or – correct the slides getting on the power a bit too hard and fast induced. Don’t get me wrong though, there was still a penalty to my leadfootedness – going sideways looks cool, but it ain’t the fastest way to go F1 racing. Plus, the game’s still happy to make your life hard if you happen to go into a corner in the wrong gear, as happens to me on the reg.
Meanwhile, on a controller it’s still hard to get that kind of in-depth feel for the car, but in the run around Albert Park I had using an Xbox pad, there’s still enough vibration to provide some feedback for you to react to and mould your driving around. Even if things on a whole feel a bit more floaty in terms of direction changes when you’re playing that way.
This brings me to F1 25’s year-on-year changes when it comes to stuff that isn’t mode-specific. Five new tracks have been laser-scanned so they’re more detailed and accurate – Bahrain, Miami, Albert Park, Suzuka and Imola.
Interestingly, creative director Gavin Cooper revealed that these tweaks has involved doing some species-correct tree placement, in order to ensure that every tree you see by the side of the track is the right kind for the specific location. Suzuka’s famous cherry blossoms are probably the most obvious example. I dunno about you, but I’m gonna be parking myself in a gravel trap and channeling my inner Springwatch to truly appreciate this change.
Trees aside, the addition of reverse layouts is a big change for three tracks – Silverstone, Zandvoort, and Austria. Cooper explained that these three were picked as they were the “best contenders” to be fun to run backwards, something I can conform from my hands-on. I’m not usually a fan of games that include a lot of reverse track layouts, as they rarely race better than they do in the intended direction and it can feel like needless track number padding if these alternative layouts are counted as separate to their right-way-around twin, but I did enjoy taking on these three.
As it turns out, trying to take the searingly fast Copse corner flat is just as much of an adrenaline rush as trying to do it the other way round, with the added peril of having grass beyond the exit kerb on the right, meaning that you’re more likely to be punished if you carry too much speed and run wide. Ditto for Zandvoort’s banked turns, with the last one I imagine likely to be a recipe for some pretty hilarious start-line pile-ups.
It’s no surprise that Codemasters has picked a trio of relatively short tracks that all boast at least a couple of these sketchy high-speed sweepers, and they seem like a solid addition, if not something I imagine I’ll be using regularly once the initial novelty wears off.
Alongside these track changes, there are some interesting additions to the cars and drivers themselves. The most noteworthy is that F1 25 sees the series finally introduce the kind of in-depth livery customisation via a decal editor that’s been commonplace in the likes of Forza and Gran Turismo for ages now, as well as having been in Midnight Club: Los Angeles as far back as the PS3 era.
It’s better to finally have the ability to actually place sponsor decals in a way that forms part of a unique livery, rather than ending up with every custom F1 car being a bit of a cookie cutter design, but it’s fair to say this is an overdue addition rather than an innovation. That said, good on Cooper and co for only admitting the previous decal system “wasn’t as good as it could have been”.
The sponsor decals themselves also got a revamp to match the expanded capabilities of this new placement system, ensuring that it’s not just a case of you trying to put together a swanky full livery with the same tools as before. Codemsters has attempted to give its array of not-quite-real companies more realistic brand identities, encouraging you to create a livery that incorporates their colours. Hopefully in a more visually-appealing way that the BWT Alpines have in recent years. You can also pick a custom font for your driver number in 25, which is a bit more unique and plays into the kind of personal branding all F1 drivers do nowadays.
Beyond this, a couple of other changes that caught my eye are the fact that your custom MyTeam car will now actually have the engine sound of whoever manufacturer you’ve picked, instead of being just the same generic tone for everyone, and also the the real-world driver radio clip voiceover introduced in F1 24 has now been extended so you’ll get it playing in qualifying as well as races.
Plus with the latter, Codemasters says it’s “doubled” just how many of these voiceover lines are in the game, and added in some from team principals, so you can hear Christian Horner whisper sweet nothings to Max Verstappen after every race because knows the team’s done for if the Dutchman leaves any time soon.
Finally, F1 World – the made that’s become the catch-all for the F1 series’ more casual one-off single player and multiplayer racing has a new PvE mode called Invitationals, which’ll see you sent a one-time code you can some friends can use to take on a specific race scenario against the AI that’ll have rewards based on how well you do. It sounds like an interesting idea, if maybe lacking the kind of unhinged bumper-car chaos that, for better or worse, defines the multiplayer of most big racing games.
Plus, the flashback system has had a little visual upgrade to tell newbies which buttons they need to press to delve back into the action. As I mentioned before, though, from what I’ve played of F1 25 so far, I’m hopeful that at least with my usual wheel and preferences setup, I’ll not need to wind back time to get myself out of quite as many backwards predicaments.
