youUntil the last few races, when Ferrari and McLaren emerged as the favorites to win, F1 had stagnated due to the total dominance of Red Bull and Max Verstappen. Luckily, there is a way to rewrite F1 history in the form of a new annual officially licensed F1 game developed by Codemasters and published by EA Sports.
This year’s version offers F1 fans their best chance yet to free the sport from Verstappen’s hegemony. It’s the first F1 game that lets you pursue a multi-season career as any of the 20 real-life drivers currently in the game. At last, avid fans can unseat Verstappen while building their favorite driver’s reputation through pure driving skill. I chose to play as Alex Albon, one of the nicest guys in F1 (he also has one of the weakest teammates; the game rewards you for winning those rivalries). With the difficulty turned down, my version of Albon has already topped the podium, even with a non-competitive Williams.
To meet drivers’ demands, Codemasters has reimagined and subtly revamped the main career mode, adding more role-playing elements than ever before, with every action on the track counting towards a driver’s overall rating. Do it well and other teams will secretly show up for exploratory meetings, but let it slip and you’ll lose the trust of your current team.
F1 24 lets you pursue multiple careers at the same time. You can play as yourself or pursue a two-player career with a friend in competitive or cooperative action. Even the game’s old Challenge mode, which had you chasing specific objectives in vignettes of ancient and modern Grand Prix races, has been transformed into a less time-intensive, more time-sensitive, full-fledged Career designed to be undertaken on a regular basis.
Bold changes to the game’s fundamental physics, particularly the tyre and suspension models, mean F1 24’s cars are more realistic than ever – you’ll have to spend just as much time looking after your tyres as a real driver would. The continued presence of the loot-box-driven, arcade-style F1 World mode is a mixed bag, but it’s at least there in a siloed form if you don’t want to pay more than the £59.95 asking price.
The essence of F1 24 is how it cleverly incorporates real-life drivers into the career mode to create limitless possibilities, as will hopefully be the case in the real sport for the remainder of this season and beyond.
Source: www.theguardian.com
