You know this song and dance by now; Codemasters is well versed in the realm of Formula 1, and its latest entry in the annual racing series further fine-tunes the long-established series.
The first iteration to release only on current-gen consoles, EA Sports F1 25 makes some adjustments in its ongoing mission to somehow cater for both casual and hardcore fans, and it mostly gets the job done.
While not everyone likes the Braking Point story mode, it returns for its third chapter here, and remains an ideal place to start for newcomers. A summary of the previous story will get you up to speed, and then begins another dramatic season for the fictitious Konnersport.
Will Devon Butler finally be likeable? Does Aiden Jackson grow a personality? Can the surprisingly high-fidelity characters escape the uncanny valley? No We won't spoil anything, but we did enjoy playing through the story despite some awkward performances.
It does a decent job of setting up scenarios that introduce some race day basics, such as overtaking, defending your position, entering the pit lane, and so on.
Braking Point is a welcome inclusion, especially for casual players, but the real meat and potatoes is the robust career mode options.
Driver Career is more or less the same as F1 24, in which you play a custom, historic, or current official driver, earning points for your chosen team and develop your car. It's a pretty in-depth mode that lets you concentrate on the racing, for the most part.
Alternatively, there's My Team, which has seen a few changes this time around. Taking on a more managerial role, this version of Career has you keeping on top of corporate matters, finances, and team personnel as well as R&D.
While My Team has greater management sim-style depth, you can't play as a custom driver; when it comes to race weekends, you'll instead fill the boots of one of your hired racers.
Ultimately this doesn't change much from a player perspective, but now, if you want to play as yourself and become an F1 champ, you must do so in Driver Career.
This feels like an unforced step backwards in terms of player fantasy; creating and managing your own team is still here, but fans will want to represent that team with their own driver too.
Whichever mode you pick, they're both detailed, deep, and highly customisable, rewarding good racing as well as strategic decision-making and keeping the team happy.
The racing itself remains highly customisable too, with all sorts of adjustable assists and difficulty sliders to allow you to find your ideal setup.
It's impressively flexible — you can make it a relatively easy drive with everything turned on, or start lowering and removing assists to give yourself a sterner, more realistic challenge.
After finding a balance that worked for us, the default AI difficulty felt much too low; you may want to crank it up a bit if you want your opponents to offer up some meaningful competition. A mid-table car shouldn't be qualifying in pole position with a few seconds to spare.
The handling is as you'd come to expect — cars feel responsive and there's a fantastic sense of speed. It's accessible but incredibly fast, with precise, smooth racing needed in order to do well. Playing with a regular DualSense controller feels great, especially as the haptics are put to decent use.
Elsewhere, F1 World is the catch-all location for creating custom Grands Prix and playing time trials, as well as various online events. The game is chock full of things to do, even featuring a handful of reverse layout circuits for the first time.
Visually the game is pretty good overall, with car models and tracks being the highlights. Character models vary; official drivers and Braking Point characters are pretty well detailed, but all other people are a step back.
Performance while racing is super smooth, but this isn't consistent across certain scenes, making it feel a little lax. Load times are also longer than you might expect, even when just loading between some menus — it can be a surprisingly sluggish game to navigate.
Conclusion
EA Sports F1 25 is overall another rock solid entry in the annual franchise. The driving is reliably good fun and impressively flexible, and the return of Braking Point is a welcome one, even if it's not the best story ever told. A robust set of modes means there's something for everyone, and it looks and sounds great on the whole. One or two career mode changes might ruffle some feathers, and navigating the game can feel slow, but by and large it's a podium finish for this F1 racer.
Comments 21
I reckon this is a 6/10 because there's no real innovation here, just a lot of emphasis on content that engages rather than entertains. We're going to keep getting F1 games like this from EA because we keep buying them. We say we want classic cars and tracks, but we won't get those because EA are thinking about improving trends. The reversed tracks idea I've seen in GRID, and there are only a few of them in the game-and they're not interesting at all.
@JDINCINERATOR Much like F1 it's probably waiting for the 2026 rule changes for the innovation
Interesting article over at sister site Pure Xbox about the demise of "Good" arcade racers such as Blur/Split Second et al makes me sad to see mediocre annual updates a la Fifa to sims like this. These are the type of games that maybe should follow the live service model and make the yearly roster updates dlc. Anyways wishful thinkin i know 😃
https://www.purexbox.com/features/talking-point-this-classic-activision-racer-came-to-xbox-15-years-ago-and-we-sorely-miss-it
I bought last year’s entry a few months ago and have barely touched it. I’m still halfway through my F2 season. It’s so boring and sterile, I can’t get bothered to even reach F1.
As per the review, serious misstep removing the option to create your own driver for My Team mode.
I don't think many will want to run the team and then step into a car with one of their random driver hires rather than themselves. Yes, I know you can race as yourself in career mode but that's a different way of playing altogether. Why not give people the option to do either, as in previous years?!
If they dropped this in the name of 'realism' because F1 drivers aren't team bosses and vice versa, then that's a very dumb choice for what's a simcade title at best.
No buy this year, because we all know they'll put this back to how it was next year and claim it as a great new feature again.
When I bought my ps4 I bought Rory mcilroys golf and it was so bare bones and barely looked better than a ps3 game. Skip to the ps5 and EA are doing the exact same thing..The road to the masters took a long time to flesh out properly with updates adding additional game modes and content which felt like it should have been there from the start and it still dosnt look like a game the ps4 couldn't handle especially if you put the game in 60fps mode which drops the resolution and graphical details. EA wrc rally again felt rushed out and was quite bare bones in content and graphically is a very mixed bag. Again additional content added via dlc felt like it should have been included from the get go. EA it's in the game..eventually!
I like the braking point mode, but otherwise it’s just exactly the same game as last year. Hard to see what else they’ve really changed.
@themightyant I agree sort of. With new teams coming next season, we should have a bigger F1 grid, maybe back to 24 cars as it should be with that top 10 points structure they have. 20 cars just isn't quite enough when you're giving half the field points.
F1 Championship Edition and F1 2012 on the PS3 are still, IMO, the best F1 games we've had in the past 18 years.
I've never been tempted to get any of the F1 games post F1 2012, and I think that's going to continue for the foreseeable future.
@N1ghtW1ng Ayrton Senna's Monaco GP2 on Mega Drive (i refuse to call it a genesis) and Geoff Cramond's F1 game on the Amiga for me, although granted both more than 18yrs old 😃
It would be nice to see older tracks from the 70s and 80s. Like that really long track in Germany Hockenheimring got cut short. Otherwise it's getting repetitive with nothing really different apart from price increase
@Jrs1 Geoff Cramond's F1 I played on the Amiga. One of the best racing games of that era.
@Hawklord Damn right bud it was groundbreaking for its time 👍
Edit - Looks like Max Verstappen may have the answer for more excitement in F1 🤣
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/maybe-throw-bananas-max-verstappen-likens-f1s-monaco-gp-rule-to-mario-kart/10726659/
As someone that league races in F1, the handling does feel better than 24 overall.
However, 24 initially felt better than 23. That is until all the "influencers" found out they were so bad at the game, resulting in Codies changing the entire model to suit them.
Hopefully they dont pander to these people and keep the current model, iterating on it to improve rather than overhaul like last time.
No VR support, no purchase for me.
just started last years f1 world is transfered alot of new stuff
@Mu5hr00m_K1ngd0m Yeah I could never understand all the hate F1 24 got from the racing influencer scene for it's handling and physics, I thought they were much better than what I experienced in F1 23. It always came off as people simply not liking change even if it was for the better.
@Jrs1
That's a good shout!
For me, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2 is the best F1 game of all the times!
@Jrs1 Split Second - what a game that was. Was on sale for a couple of quid on Xbox a few months back and is still a brilliant game. I'm not sure it sold brilliantly back in the day but would love to see it revisited. A new game with modern hardware would be spectacular.
@Scrubchub Damn good game, its in my "holy trinity" of arcade racers lol
Splir/Second
Blur
Pure
@Cornpop76 that being said both EA wrc and the road to the masters play brilliantly. I don't think I'm ever going to get bored of either titles. One thing I think is quite simply stunning is the lighting in the wrc game. Driving through Latvia,Estonia and Finland at dusk is superb and the sky boxes are really cool too. Just a shame they were rushed.
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