After last year’s rather bare-bones F1 24, 2025 sees the welcome return of Braking Point, the fictional story mode that now integrates into the ‘My Team’ career mode. That means that when you bring the fictional Konnorsport team through the story—now as title challengers—you’ll have the chance to take the team through the F1 calendar like any other. Mighty impressive considering how staid the FIA license has been for many years now.
Similarly, if you buy the premium ‘Iconic Edition’, which is lavished with Sir Lewis Hamilton branding, you’ll also be able to take Brad Pitt’s fictional team from the forthcoming F1 Apple TV movie through the My Team mode. But one thing you won’t be able to do this time is be a manager/driver. Apparently most players just gave themselves the best upgrades—you would, right?—and left their teammates wanting. Instead you now just choose which of your drivers to race as, and (hopefully) distribute your resources more fairly.
On the track, there are some immediately obvious improvements. Exclusive to the PC version, there’s a new lighting system: Path Traced Lighting, which requires drivers (graphics drivers, not Nigel Mansell) not currently available on the consoles, as well as ‘beefy hardware’.
Better still, LIDAR technology has been used to 3D map certain real-world circuits during actual race weekends, so you get completely authentic camber, elevation and track width, as well as more naturalistic realism like species-correct tree placement. Expect this new realism on five tracks, namely Melbourne, Suzuka, Bahrain, Imola and Miami. New track shaders have been used on the LIDAR-created tracks, making everything look noticeably more realistic, but it’s the touches like sakura season cherry blossom on the appropriate trees that really bring the beauty.
One addition many might consider minor but actually requires plenty of work to implement convincingly is reverse layouts, available now for three tracks: Silverstone, Austria, and Zandvoort. Having tested them all, I can confirm it feels scandalously wrong to backwards up Hangar Straight.
F1 World returns, with new options for improving your facilities, and doing so will not only give you different aesthetics for your factory scenes, it’ll directly affect your team’s personnel capacity. The mode is seen internally as being more of a dip in/dip out inclusion, mainly for gamers who don’t have the time free to sink hours into career mode, which is welcome. It’s spiced up this year with new rewards offering the chance to take part in invitationals. These are multiplayer races with custom rules and AI cars making up the rest of the grid. The more friends you can bring, the easier it will be to beat the AI and claim enough points to win the prize.
Codemasters Birmingham is well aware of criticism from some players concerning the car handling of F1 24, though this was mostly picked up by wheel users under ‘extreme circumstances’. So the new handling model aims to pick the best from F1 23 and F1 24. Playing the game with an ultra-wide monitor and Fanatec Direct Drive wheel, it feels great. Supremely controllable and the Ferrari even seems to have a looser rear-end than its rivals, which is absolutely authentic right now, intentional or otherwise.
You may still experience a sense of déjà vu, however. Free Practice still includes R&D programs with the usual track acclimatisation and research run minigames, and the option to play a percentage risk microgame to skip practice still allows you to still collect R&D points without spending hours on every race.
Smaller, quality of life enhancements like four difficulty settings instead of three for Braking Point 3 and the ability to choose which driver to play as in some chapters of the story in branching scenes mean the game is as accommodating as possible. You can even choose between Sky Sports and Channel 4’s commentary team, which is a surprising but impressive use of the broadcast license. While there’s sadly no Murray Walker BBC option, fans of vintage F1 will at least now see driver ‘icons’ drafted into other teams as you play, so you might end up racing against Michael Schumacher… if you toggle the option to allow it. Things could get very weird very quickly with that feature enabled.
Nvidia’s Audio2Face technology is in evidence, giving the new R&D heads a more realistic appearance as they converse with you, though I didn’t see much screen time afforded to them in the limited hands-on time I had with the My Team mode. You can tell who everybody is meant to be in the revised post-race scenes too. While not quite perfectly photorealistic, it is certainly getting better every year.
Liveries will be more varied and editable, with more realistic-looking outcomes thanks to movable sponsor decals and even baked-in sponsors on special sets so your custom team looks like it really belongs on the grid. Special edition liveries will now be usable everywhere once you’ve unlocked them and will no longer be time-limited live service items. There are also selectable fonts and colours for your driver number, and this can be different on the front compared to the side. Every element feels expanded and, more than ever, it’s up to you how you want your F1 game to look and feel.
Even if you strip away the peripheral content, the core driving is looking super-slick. More realistic than ever, with greater scope and freedom. It is, of course, essentially following the same career template as it’s done for many years now, but if you’ve read this far, you’re probably fully aware of that. Still, EA hasn’t revealed everything just yet. Apparently there’s a major moment of drama in the new Braking Point 3 story that ’causes chaos’. So… expect surprises. But also expect F1 25 to be a reassuringly full-featured entry in the series.
