Frontier Developments is allowing you to step into the garage and see if you have what it takes to guide a team through the season and find success. Other companies have tried titles like this, as I throw out names like MLB Front Office Manager from 2K Sports and NFL Head Coach from EA (and Motorsport Manager from Playsport). As it relates to NFL Head Coach and Front Office Manager, while I love those titles and still play them to this day, both titles could have gone deeper. This brings us to my F1 Manager 2022 review.
Does the newest title in the sports management scene fall into the same traps as previous efforts have, or does it learn from those mistakes and push the envelope? Let’s find out!
F1 Manager 2022 Review
What I Like
Authenticity
From the minute you fire up F1, it drips with information, action, and decisions that mimic what is shown and heard on any F1 Grand Prix weekend. F1 Manager allows you to take over and make real-time decisions from practice and qualifying to the actual race. The best part about making these decisions is their impact on each weekend component. The game allowed me to take control, make real-time choices, and watch those choices manifest on screen.
The game also does an excellent job of walking you through each decision, which I will get into a bit later, but know that each choice can have a considerable impact and either open the doors for a podium shot or have the board losing confidence in you.
Now, one wrong decision or even a lousy weekend never had me standing in front of the board needing to explain my mindset, but string enough head scratchers together and tensions will rise. The last thing you want in F1 Manager is having the team questioning you, the drivers losing faith in you, the board withdrawing funds, and you losing your job at the end of the year.
Once I started getting into the specifics of the game, I started making choices like where to allocate the funds while ensuring I stayed within F1 regulations. I also had to choose which driver got the newest equipment, where to spend development points, which sponsorships made the most sense for the team, and had to keep both my drivers happy.
A lot is going on all at once, which is the primary superficial responsibility that was part of my job title. Once I had control over those aspects, it was time to work with the engineers, R&D department, and media. Most of these are simple choices, but they still had an impact.
The larger requisites came from making choices for each driver, car, and the track and venue we were at on any given Grand Prix weekend. Thankfully, the game provides a deep research and development experience, and depending on the need of the manufactured part, the item can be built in a week, a few days, or overnight. However, expedition comes at a price, and that price takes a hit on the regulated expenditures of the team, so choose wisely.
The research and development team will often confer with you about available options and explain your approach’s risk vs. reward choices. This system works very similar to what is found in the “normal” F1 series during career mode but is expanded upon and utilized in a way that makes more sense from a director’s point of view.
A Grand Prix weekend brings on an onslaught of choices and preferences where I could embrace the responsibility of it or hand it off to my team. Options range from a simple tire decision to deciding to switch up suspensions at the last second.
I’ve talked about the authenticity of how the action unfolds on the screen. Another very nice touch is having both the broadcast team occasionally break in with details on the track, and the ability to listen to the drivers and race engineers conversing about real-time strategy and being aware of car and track details. Additionally, while taking care of the organizational decisions daily is essential, F1 Manager 2022 also lets you refine your drivers and help them improve in areas that need attention. By accomplishing specific tasks in F1 Manager, you accrue XP points, which can be applied to the stable of drivers.
For instance, in my career, Max Verstappen struggles a bit with in-car reactions and smoothness around the track, and Perez (his teammate) has issues with adaptability and cornering. I can use the awarded development points and raise those attributes. The rating improvement system also considers the driver’s age and experience, so increasing and maintaining the increases for someone the age of Verstappen is a bit easier than that of his elder teammate, Sergio Perez.
Ultimately, each race weekend and the time in between is filled with F1 minutia that I could manage daily or defer to my management staff. Regardless of your choice, the game does a solid job of creating what it feels like to walk and work behind the scenes of an F1 organization.
Optionality
As soon as I entered my first career mode effort, it was apparent that developer Frontier Developments had a target audience of more than just hardcore F1 fans in mind when creating this game. With every choice or option available to me, an in-game assistant took the time to explain what it all meant, both in speech and text.
Another nice touch is the ability to delegate certain aspects of the race weekend to other crew members if you’re uncomfortable with an action or if it feels mundane to the overall experience. That ability covers almost every aspect, and can be changed to manual and back through each weekend, so the game never forces you into a corner when deciding.
Once the race weekend action starts on the rack, whether it be practice, qualifying, or the race itself, the options are just as plentiful.
F1 Manager 2022 gave me the choice of how to set up the cars, when to call the drivers in, when to pit, and what changes I deemed necessary between sessions. The game also gives you the option of how to view the action on the track. You can watch everything unfold from a teleprompter point of view where you see a digital overhead view, or you can lock into multiple race cameras that show the action from many perspectives.
For me, this is such a meaningful touch, as at certain times I wanted a complete overview of the entire field, and sometimes I wanted specific insight into my cars and drivers. Again, F1 Manager does an admirable job of making the game accessible for those curious while still giving the hardcore fan a deep, realistic experience.
Tutorials
I have hit on this subject a bit so far, but I feel it deserves its own section here. I am a massive fan of F1 and watch as often as possible, but understanding the sport and all that it entails can be difficult for some, especially when factoring in all of the inner workings of an organization.
The tutorials and in-game assistant system provided by Frontier are outstanding. The game does an excellent job of explaining how everything works and why it’s essential, and will even question you if you are about to make a choice that seems contrary to what the weekend game plan was set for initially.
It’s nothing groundbreaking for a title to have tutorials included in their game, as that has happened for decades of gaming. That said, the approach that the developers take here is exceptionally well done and helps onboard new fans and lets them become comfortable with how everything works in F1 Manager.
Typically in my reviews, if I am listing tutorials as a strength and something I liked, the rest of the game might have some real issues, but that is not the case here. The importance of a robust tutorial system in a “sports management” title such as F1 Manager cannot be overstated.
What I Don’t Like
Not Being Behind The Wheel
There isn’t much that I didn’t enjoy about the new title from Frontier, but there is one concern for me. It took a bit of adjustment going from the F1 racing series by Codemasters to the F1 Manager series. That concern is the lack of adrenaline-producing white-knuckle-racing moments that I have been accustomed to. While two different developers and two different games, it was hard to disassociate them.
As I mentioned above, moments of excitement and stress-inducing situations occur, but it pales in comparison to what is provided in the F1 series game. It feels odd comparing the two because both titles are entirely different approaches, but for those expecting the same type of excitement in F1 Manager, understand this is more of a cerebral experience.
Again, this is not an indictment of F1 Manager, as it delivers a solid overall experience. Still, expectations may be skewed because these two games are closely associated with the same sport. As a longtime fan and veteran of the F1 series, I found it somewhat hard not to want to take the wheel and feel the excitement in the first-person view as I always have, and that feeling stayed with me throughout my time with the game.
Bottom Line
F1 Manager 2022 is a solid first effort from Frontier that does provide an authentic experience as an F1 manager behind the scenes. The game throws an awful lot at you and, at times, can feel intimidating. It also provides an excellent set of tutorials and walks you through everything while allowing you to take over manually at your discretion.
It may lack the direct action that the F1 series does have, but that was never the intention to begin with. The game is about managing an F1 team, making tough decisions, keeping the board happy, and finding consistent success in some form. For me, F1 Manager 2022 will never be a game that’s always in the rotation, but it will make an appearance quite often. It’s also a title that is not only accessible but inadvertently teaches newcomers about the sport in ways that a standard broadcast could never pull off.
