Formula One may be the pinnacle of motorsport, but it’s also a soap opera, and with F1 23’s single-player story mode Braking Point, developer Codemasters has run wild with that idea. It follows the ups and downs of the fictional rookie team Konnersport in the 2022 and 2023 seasons, a rollicking rollercoaster of bitchiness and tense relationships, and cleverly casts you as several characters, behind the wheel and in the paddock. It blends nostalgia with some great what-ifs and, running to 17 chapters, is pleasingly substantial.
It also offers a great introduction to F1 23’s main Career mode, since it takes in a representative selection of tracks. This year, Career mode and My Team (which casts you as owner of the team as well as a driver) are largely unchanged. Both already did a fine job of replicating the real experience of pursuing a Formula One career, and Codemasters has left well alone.
If you’re looking for more arcade-style racing, rather than simulation, look to F1 World - the replacement for last year’s F1 Life, which was essentially an egregious excuse to shoehorn loot boxes into the game. F1 World puts you in a generic car, which can be upgraded as you level up, and its set of mini-races and custom race designer offer a gentler way of ease into competitive online racing – and makes a lot more sense than F1 Life did..
Of vastly more interest to Formula One game devotees, as opposed to those who have recently discovered the sport, are the underlying technical tweaks that Codemasters has made. Both handling and physics models have been improved, and the already impressively responsive cars now feel even more astonishingly fast and grippy. Codemasters has also fiddled with the tech underlying the controller, which is more of a gamechanger than it sounds, since it vastly improves the experience of playing F1 23 using a gamepad, rather than an expensive wheel-and-pedals setup; at last, you can get real throttle-blending from the right trigger, which makes negotiating tight, low-speed street circuits a pleasure rather than a chore.
Followers of the sport will also be beguiled by the presence of the new Las Vegas track, which takes in a big chunk of the Strip and won’t be built in real life until this November. Over and above the inevitable razzmatazz that the Formula One circus’s arrival in Vegas will bring, the track is pretty good, with a few technical, typical street-circuit sequences and two long straights, one of which is particularly vast. Its closest existing equivalents on the calendar would be Baku and Saudi Arabia.
F1 23 provides plenty of evidence that Codemasters has been spending Electronic Arts’s cash wisely since it was bought up in 2021. There is plenty of novelty here to attract seasoned F1 game pros and newcomers, who may start off with F1 World. It’s technically magnificent: it looks and feels incredible, and its off-track production values are sky-high. Sure, the continued presence of loot boxes – seemingly de rigueur in any EA Sports game these days – cheapens it slightly, but at least it doesn’t force them upon you too brashly. And until November, it will provide your only means of discovering what driving around Las Vegas in a Formula One car feels like.
• F1 23 is out 16 June; £59.99. The platform tested was Xbox Series X
