Review: F1 Manager 2022
| Author: | Brian Powell Jr |
| Date: | November 5, 2022 5:56:00 pm EDT |
| Last Updated: | June 1, 2024 9:01:59 pm EDT |
| Read Time: | 5 min read |
| Tags: |
Game Details
| Genre | Developer | Publisher | Release Date | Reviewer's Sentiments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sport Management | Frontier Developments | Frontier Developments | 2022-08-30 | Not Recommended |
The Game At A Glance
F1 Manager 2022 feels and plays a lot like the spiritual predecessor, Motorsport Manager. In terms of complexity, there were more options and variables to adjust for when it comes to driver management and race car development. However, all of this really didn’t matter as you could finish in the top 10 managing the Haas race team in just simple pit strategy (i.e. pit less than everyone else). This is where the game started to fall apart. I had one of the worst teams on the F1 grid where my 2022 season goal was to only finish 8th in the team standings. Your task, as Team Principal, is to meet the board of directors goals and set your team up for the following year.
The Good
F1 Manager offers a fair amount of choice/options when it comes to how you develop and manage your team. The car development aspect is much more challenging, but the length of time it takes to develop new parts depends on factors like testing time, staffing levels, and funding. Car parts also have more detailed characteristics to them that have a bigger impact on the performance and longevity of other parts.
Development of new car parts should always be undergone if you want to stay ahead, but you have to manage your spare parts inventory as well as crashes can and will happen. I had one race weekend where I blew through my supply of spare front wings do to crashes in qualifying and the race itself. I enjoyed this design focus of the game because when compared to Motorsport Manager you can’t just infinitely repair something. Some degree of strategy has to be used or you’ll be forced to DNF. They also chose to not include the gimmicky weight reduction feature in MM where you could focus on reliability and then save a few points off on race day for big performance gains.
Rule changes are also a thing and this is where you’ll need to also invest part of your engineering team to research new part designs to accommodate the following years’ rule changes. In essence, if you fail to invest enough time researching the rule changes your car could end up performing worse the following season. Performing adequate R&D requires you to manage how much time you spend running simulations both computationally and in the wind tunnel. Throughout the season, there are testing periods where you can only spend by so many hours in the wind tunnel or running computations within that period. This testing block time is shared across both part development and next season R&D.
During the race, you have more options in terms of driver pace and ERS control. In total, you have 15 different options for driver controls split equally among pace/tire wear, fuel consumption/engine power, and ERS usage. I found that you didn’t need to adjust these settings too often, unless you were competing for a position in which case the correct timing for when to fully engage the ERS boost and go full attack on the tires can help secure your position or pass your opponent.
The Bad
Where F1 Manager 2022 falls flat is that it’s trying too hard to be a real life simulation. You don’t have features like “Create your own team” or design your own paint scheme. To many gamers who play sports games, having the option to create your own team is part of the fun. I tried to work around the fact that the game wouldn’t let me make my own team and went with the Haas racing team.
Other issues I encountered while playing the game were all race-related. The first issue were visual bugs where my drivers would dive deep into a turn, looking like they were going to crash into the back of the car in front, only from them to either pass them or just “bump draft” them. Last I checked I wasn’t playing a NASCAR game.
The second issue I had with the game was in regards to the track condition charts in the race control view. Unlike MM where they break down the dampness into categories, F1 Manager displays it in millimeters. Yes, you read that right. Since I have a background in science, the metric system didn’t scare me, but the track condition graphs were useless. The graphs don’t have a y-axis scale so all you know is something is either 0%, 100%, or somewhere in between. For track grip that’s fine. For how much water is on the track, where you don’t know what the maximum amount is, this is not okay. This has a big impact on pit strategy as I was having to rely on real-time track water levels to judge when I needed to change from slicks to inters to wets and back again. Using the wrong compound tire for the track condition is pretty much just forfeiting the race so I found this to be a major headache.
The Ugly
At the end of October, Frontier announced that they will only be making one more significant gameplay change/improvement to the game before focusing on other projects while continuing to make minor patches to the underlying systems in the game itself. Personally, I look at this as the beginning of an EA Sports type of partnership with F1 to pump out a new game every year. If you’re a fan of this business model, more power to you, but I find it hard to keep buying subsequent titles when their are marginal improvements at best with the major focus being on an updated roster.
While this is the current trend in sports games, to provide the highest degree of realism to fans of the series (not necessarily gamers), I’d rather just play fantasy sports with coworkers or friends where we can hang out instead of playing a simulation. At the end of the day, F1 Manager is a F1 racing simulation where you control a real team, with real drivers graded on an arbitrary scale, and your actions towards part development, R&D, and race strategy can lead to the performing better or worse than expected. I’m rather disappointed in F1 Manager 2022 as a whole. Even though the game offers great visuals, the game focuses too much on realism that it makes a sport game that is really just a decent simulation to use for sports betting.