Shut Up And Drive
HIGH Smart tweaks to singleplayer and more options than before.
LOW A lack of onboarding for new players… Again.
WTF Weird tie-ins to the upcoming F1 movie.
Last year, I reviewed EA Sports F1 24. In that write-up, I mentioned my journey into becoming a fan of the titular motorsport, involving a lot of outside research (thank you, Netflix) and diving into EA and Codemasters’ annual series for the first time.
In the year since I first played F1 24, I’ve been glued to my TV every Sunday to catch all the races, cheering on McLaren and wondering what ancient entity has put a curse on Ferrari. This appreciation for the sport became full-blown excitement for the next installment, F1 25.
After months of buildup, advertising new features, and some uncertainty regarding developer Codemasters’ future, I was curious to see what the latest in the series had to offer. Annual sports titles are known to iterate rather than truly innovate, but I still had confidence that the famed racing studio would deliver something special.
F1 25 is a driving simulator set across the 2025 Formula One season. Players choose from a variety of modes with different goals, yet the objective remains the same — drive. Played from either a third or first-person perspective, the main single-player modes are Career and Braking Point.
The career mode returns from last year’s installment, with some smart improvements. MyTeam (dubbed MyTeam 2.0) tasks the player to create a new F1 organization to compete in the world championship. Rather than playing as a combination racer/manager, players create their manager and team, selecting various options to align their preferences.
Feeling like a lighter version of F1 Manager, I appreciated the options to fine-tune the experience, such as selecting an archetype for the kind of manager I want to be. My choices were between a driver-friendly one, a manager with engineering experience, or someone drowning in cash and wanting to run everything like a business. I picked the engineering background, as the boosts to R&D and team morale seemed worth it.
Being a manager means taking care of a lot of little things like PR opportunities, balancing a budget, dealing with staff concerns, and so forth. Every week before a race, players are presented with these issues, and it’s their job to determine what’s worth tackling. I love the smaller, mundane choices, such as scheduling a driver’s time on a simulator before a new race or deciding which facility gets an upgrade. These have a real impact come race day, and being able to see how the proverbial sausage is made right before hitting the track is both cool and stressful.
As the manager, it’s also important to make sure the drivers are happy, whether that means granting them better upgrades and parts for their cars or simply leading them correctly to victory. There’s also the option to sign other drivers, meaning that the player can poach someone else’s best driver, though others can do the same to the player’s team!
With the manager being a custom-created character, players choose their two drivers from a pool of real-life Formula 2 drivers, each with their stats. The driving is even better than it was last year, thanks to the technical prowess that developer Codemasters possesses. Specifically, handling has improved, resulting in cars that feel much heavier and closer to the ground, making tight corners feel more satisfying to maneuver.
While there’s no true tutorial system (again!), there are plenty of excellent assist options that can make driving easy for newcomers, and it can be tweaked as much as possible.
The Driver career is largely unchanged from last year, but still allows for meaningful choices to be made. Here, players can choose between real drivers from the current F1 roster, F2 drivers, legends such as the late, great Ayrton Senna, and even Brad Pitt from the upcoming F1 movie (weird).
The other major single-player option is Braking Point. This full-blown story mode continues a narrative from F1 ’21 and ‘23. Here, players follow the fictional Konnersport racing team as they try to compete with the best teams in Formula One. Presented with some excellent cutscenes and mixing faux-documentary segments to add greater context and heighten the drama, makes it an entertaining watch. Gameplay involves a lot of racing and slight management gameplay.
On the track, players usually have to complete an objective, like beating a certain lap time or moving ahead in the positions against a certain driver. The light management sections usually involve solving some intrapersonal issues in Konnersport, like staff disputes or PR controversies. I like the idea of a racing title being linear for the sake of the story, and the off-track drama adds so much excitement to the driving. It’s great, and I’m happy it’s separate from the dedicated career modes.
While some of the changes aren’t drastic, the minor things do make it a definite upgrade over the last entry, especially regarding the options in single-player. Other changes include presentation choices, like adding more detail in the tracks to make them as close to their real-world counterparts. Being a Miamian, I appreciated how nice the Miami Grand Prix track looked, with added detail like foliage and very lifelike lighting. Being able to race these courses in new reverse variants adds a lot of variety here as well.
F1 25 is an exceptional driving game and one that further cements developer Codemasters’ place as one of the finest racing developers currently working. It was a pleasure to go through the excellent story mode, and I spent many hours obsessing over the expansive MyTeam mode. While it may not feel like an evolutionary change from F1 24, there’s more than enough here to keep racing fans happy for the season.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is published by EA Sports and developed by Codemasters. It is available on PC, XBX/S and PS5. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PS5. Approximately 20 hours were spent in singleplayer and the game was not completed. Approximately 1 hour was spent in the multiplayer mode.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E for Mild Langauge. According to the site: This is a racing game in which players can drive Formula One cars on real-world tracks. Players compete in a variety of game modes that include Career, Time Trial, Racing League, and Grand Prix. Some language in the game is partially censored by audible bleeps (e.g., “Let’s [bleep] go boys”; “I [bleep] it all up again”; What the [bleep]?).
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present in the options menu.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are plenty of visual cues during races and the menu-based gameplay segments. All of these can be adjusted in the menu. Subtitles are present but cannot be resized. As no audio cues are needed for gameplay, I’d say this is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.
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