F1® 24

I've spent a fair amount of time with Codemasters' F1 series over the years, and F1 24 is one of the most interesting splits the franchise has produced: half the community calls it the most approachable F1 game ever made, the other half calls it a step backwards from F1 23. Both camps are right, depending on what you're here for. The headline addition is the overhauled Driver Career mode, and it genuinely delivers. You can slide into the seat of a real 2024 grid driver or start from scratch in Formula 2, building your Driver Rating across four tracked attributes: Experience, Racecraft, Awareness, and Pace. A Driver Recognition system monitors your on-track and off-track behavior, which then influences contract offers and R&D resource allocation as seasons progress. Cut a contract to jump ship to a better team mid-season? Absolutely possible, just like real life. There is also a two-player co-op career that lets a friend ride alongside you on the same team or set up as a direct rival on a different one, which is a genuine standout feature for anyone who wants to run a season with a mate. The Braking Point story mode is absent this year, following the series' established every-other-year pattern, and that hole is noticeable if narrative-driven content is what brought you back. The Dynamic Handling system is where opinions fracture hardest. Codemasters rebuilt the suspension kinematics and tire model from the ground up, and on a gamepad the result is a car that is very, very easy to keep pointing forward. Wet weather in particular feels almost frictionless; you can slide wide, abuse curbs, and brush off mistakes that would have punted you into the wall in F1 23. For absolute newcomers this is genuinely great news. For wheel-and-pedal setups, the feedback gap is more pronounced: the self-steer resistance and steering weight build-up feel reduced, which dulls the tactile sense of the car working beneath you. Tire temperature, fuel load depletion, and compound choice do still affect handling in a meaningful way across a race stint, which keeps race strategy honest even if the raw moment-to-moment driving is more forgiving than before. A major post-launch patch addressed the worst of the launch-day physics complaints and improved AI behavior, with rival drivers now making more mistakes, locking up, and occasionally retiring with mechanical failures. AI still bunches into DRS trains on medium and high difficulty, and the Pitcoin premium currency system wrapped around cosmetics in F1 World remains a persistent irritant. The My Team mode is largely unchanged from last year, and the mid-race objectives handed out by engineers and sponsors feel tacked-on rather than integrated. On the technical side, the game runs extremely well on mid-range PC hardware, scales smoothly from modest rigs up to high-end setups, and the track visuals, particularly at Spa, Lusail, and Jeddah following their reworks, look close to broadcast quality. Bottom line for the friend group crowd: split-screen is present, the assists system is genuinely comprehensive, and the handling changes mean a brand-new player will not spin helplessly into the barriers on lap one. That lowers the barrier for a Saturday-night race night considerably. If you already own F1 23 and a wheel, the upgrade case is thin at full price. If you are new to the series entirely, this is comfortably the most accessible starting point Codemasters has shipped.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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