Oh Canada, you have the best track. Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? On the eve of the Canadian Grand Prix, EA and Codemasters’ latest foray into the world of Formula 1, F1 23, launched. There have been a host of changes to the calendar, new circuit layouts, some additions that didn’t make it to the calendar at all, the return of Breaking Point, and more. I had taken a much-needed break from the F1 games over the last two years, though I did play around with last year’s release due to it being part of EA Play on Game Pass.

Returning with the upgraded next generation of cars from last year, the ground effect behemoths now that are F1 cars still pose an interesting question. When is a corner a corner? As seen in Baku, (where five corners don’t exist) or Jeddah where half the track practically doesn’t exist. I try and yet always feel as if I’m failing to explain just how mindbogglingly brilliant the science of F1 is. This is especially true when Codemasters creates a reasonable simulation that is accessible to a degree for a large number of people. It is funny-money cars doing unbelievable things easily, as driven by reasonably competent people who are mad.

Let’s touch on the big addition this year, the return of Breaking Point. Practically speaking, Breaking Point 2 is what Netflix’s Drive to Survive wishes it was, and what some sections of the internet believe the series thinks of itself. It has high drama, lots of heads butting, big personalities, and at the center of it, everyone’s favorite “daddy’s money” driver, Devon Butler. He is a love-to-hate villain in a piece of fiction you can’t help but get invested in. Playing as the Milky Bar kid, Aiden Jackson, once again you are fighting this petulant child for every inch of track.

It isn’t just angry captain blandness you’ll play as, which I am sure will annoy the type of fragile men that shout women shouldn’t be in open wheel racing. You’ll also take on the story of Britain’s own little tax dodger, Callie Mayer. Fighting in F2, the hotshot young driver is managed by Jackson’s old teammate Casper Akkerman. Without too many spoilers, the two stories collide while Jackson and Butler can’t get along as teammates in the newly formed Konnersport Butler Global Racing. If only Davidoff was in league with controversial high-ranking politicians and had to pull his sponsorship for some reason.

Though outside of (and often exceeding) the goals set out in a very strict and highly dramatized version of F1, you have career modes. Offered in single-player and multiplayer, you can hop in an already existing team starting out in F2 or jumping straight ahead into F1. Alternately, you can start your own team set to join the grid at the start of the 2023 season. Nothing here is particularly new, though if you pick up the Championship Edition, you can sign Breaking Point 2 stars or others like Nigel Mansell, Jamie Chadwick, Pastor Maldonado, and Kamui Kobayashi. That said, I have one issue with the career modes as a whole.

Many fans are vocal about select tracks such as Miami, Yas Marina, Barcelona (pre-2022), Paul Richard, Qatar, and everyone’s favorite stick to beat the calendar reveal with, Monaco. I get some of the hate, but two that I despise driving a full weekend of are Jeddah and Miami. It’s great we have custom seasons then, isn’t it? Well, within reason. F2 it is an option of 13, 8, and 3 circuits visited in your parade among the youngsters, but it is 23, 16, and 10 at the top of motorsport. Due to the hard limit, you have to sacrifice decent choices to make the 16 cut.

Not only that, but with the likes of Portugal, Shanghai, and Paul Richard available to drive in the Time Trial mode that is hidden away this year in the new F1 World menu, disappointingly you can’t add supplements for your subtractions to the calendar. As we found out in 2020, all you need to demarcate a World Championship is 16 races, so why can’t we just earmark career mode to allow any number between 16 and 23? It seems like a better option than such an uncompromising restriction.

Of course, those aren’t the only modes. The F1 World space wants to merge some single-player live service components with multiplayer. The best place for them both, if we’re honest is mostly out of the way. This year’s Podium Pass plays a lot more into it, and in fact, runs up to 50 levels a season now. In the simplest form, there is a single-player benefit to playing some of the F1 World elements. You get some stuff for the utterly pointless apartment thing that was introduced last time (I believe), and it is purely a vanity project for those with tastes that would rival Liberace.

The truth is, I don’t hate the F1 World mode, I just find it pointless. The single-player-focused component is entirely based around your car and team in the F1 World space, which if you blast through half of the Podium Pass with the VIP thing enabled and play lots of races in other modes, you’ll easily have some of the best parts and team members. This makes winning easy. Both team members and parts are changed in the garage portion, and given that everything has a rarity and score, it screams live-service. If that doesn’t, the Compendium does.

With rare and highly valued parts and currencies that you get from the Podium Pass, as well as typical racing in the F1 World space, you’ll win comfortably as I did in one of the series the single-player portion offers by lapping everyone up to 3rd. After a certain point, you’ll unlock the goals section, which can vary from just doing 15 laps to doing the fastest laps on specific circuits. Completing goals gets you more parts, money, team members, and even insight. With certain team members enabled, you also get higher insight from racing. “What does insight do?” I hear you ask.

The Compendium is your Panini sticker book of F1 history. Completing races gets you some stickers if your mind is FIFA-inclined. If for some reason you absolutely must fill out this digital sticker book that will reset next year when F1 24 releases, you can spend insight to complete the Compendium. It isn’t too egregious when you start out, but we all know the player pack nonsense that has gone on with FIFA for the better part of a decade. Not only that, but completing images gives you other rewards which can feed into performance, and dismantling low-value components in the garage gives you more stickers.

Like a Goya, Kahlo, and even Hieronymus Bosch painting, it is disturbing in its cyclical nature, feeding into itself to waste more and more of your time. That is what it is doing, and there is no pretending otherwise. Why else would I have this luxury apartment decorated in the gaudiest of dysfunctional furnishings when it provides no active gameplay benefit? If you want to grind up your license so you aren’t in multiplayer lobbies with people who wish they had a Karting career, a rich parent, and the chance to let Michael Masi do as he pleases, the single-player portion might be for you.

I attempted to play some of the multiplayer for review purposes more than anything. I thought the “memed” version of F1 lobbies was just a joke. As it turns out, when someone Lewis Hamilton’s you into Copse at Silverstone punting you into second last place, then you recover into the top 10 only for a Red Bull to cut Vale and ram you up the DRS in Club on the last lap, it isn’t great. Your opinion quickly shifts back to, “Those are hardly races, I’ve had tamer rides in a bumper car.” The opinion was sealed when on the entry into the Variante Ascari at Monza, someone decided that a Daniil Kvyat impression was called for.

Breaking Point season 2 is where I think F1 23 stands out the most. I know it is highly dramatized and shows snapshots of a season that didn’t (or couldn’t) happen in F1. There is a lot of gatekeeping surrounding F1 at the moment specifically based on Drive to Survive and the partisan nature of F1 teams and drivers particularly in recent years. Nonetheless, a fictional story about fictional characters doing something within the realm of F1 is fun. Giving a story that was fun and engaging for a majority of the time is something I’m going to praise in spite of the gatekeepers.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but young Callie gets into an F1 seat ahead of Jamie Chadwick and starts butting heads as quickly as everyone around her. Cocky, a little brash, and often confrontational when Davidoff or Devon are around, she’s a more complex and enjoyable to-play protagonist than Jackson. Though in the latter half of the second season, Jackson gets a little bit more aggressive and becomes a little bit more likable than his squeaky-clean personality originally suggests. Ultimately it makes the showdown at the end of the season a bit more interesting.

The season itself within Breaking Point 2 is an interesting one, as you globe trot in the circus that is F1 but miss some highly promoted sections of the F1 calendar. Once you’re playing as Callie, there isn’t so much as a whisper about Qatar. Despite being promoted to high heavens, Vegas doesn’t appear either. I don’t mind it, it is just the point that this highly enjoyable piece of fiction that is a kind of promotion for the drama of F1 both on and off the track just ignores places like Saudi and Qatar when you play as a woman, or even Vegas simply because it is Vegas.

It would be fine if you could just go over to the career mode and play those races, but I’ve run into a game-breaking bug. More than a dozen times now, I’ve tried loading my single-player My Team save from the career menu, particularly as I was about to jump into the Spanish Grand Prix weekend. Nonetheless, every time I attempt to load that save, it leads to a complete crash to the desktop. Another save in career mode for My Driver in the middle of an F2 season also crashes, though only when I try to delete that save. My Driver seems to play fine though My Team is plainly unable to load.

This may be a result of an earlier bug when driving around Monaco. I was in photo mode, disconnected a controller for a moment, and when it was reconnected it had taken a photo. Sounds like nothing, right? The bar along the top of the screen notifying you of where the image goes appeared and proceeded not to disappear for the proceeding 35 minutes when I was on the podium (as seen above). Exiting the whole game got rid of it, but of course, the aforementioned inability to re-enter My Team was compromised. This was either a result of that or a further issue that I don’t entirely understand how it came about.

Otherwise, it is practically the same as years before on both counts, but this time you can have red flags to once again change up the strategy of your race. I’m a little disappointed with how it is implemented overall: You are notified about a red flag, you fade to black, come back up in the pre-race strategy screen, and fade back up on the grid for the restart. I understand it could be difficult to program a way of stopping in the pit lane in the correct spot. However, we have “immersive” pit stops, pit exits and entry, starts, and safety-car procedures. It is just a little lacking in that area.

I have one last issue that I think should’ve been handled before launch, and that is exiting the garage in My Team. In Monaco, it is impossible to exit the garage for practice or qualifying (outside of hot laps) without clipping the wall, since you have no control in the fast lane until the pit exit line. Also, you can be going too fast and not turning enough on the exit line of some tracks like Baku, destroying the front wing. “Well, use flashbacks that lots of people use because they aren’t F1 drivers and just want to have fun with a game,” I hear very few say, but some won’t let you rewind far enough.

Performance-wise, F1 23 is aimed a little closer to Lance Stroll than Fernando Alonso if you get what I’m saying. Despite meeting the recommended requirements listed on Steam and in certain cases exceeding them, there can be a few odd dips in frame rate despite an okay consistency. Outside of the bug-related crash to the desktop, I’ve also come across a point where the entire game froze/crashed exiting the pits in Baku. This isn’t a consistent problem, though it is notable that it happened when it did: while doing something you’ll do a thousand times.

When F1 23 is good, it is one of the greats. When it is frustrating, it is near insufferable. I want to play the My Team save I have to the point where I look back at the end of the year and wonder how I’ve found the time to play 300+ hours in 6 months, as I did in years prior. The thing is, I can’t, and with how fantastically awful the multiplayer experience is with people who willingly get penalized or disqualified, I don’t want to join that wretched hive of scum and villainy either.

The fast-paced action of wheel-to-wheel or tire management-based racing, the accessibility, and the plethora of modes to play offers something for just about everyone. I know the try-hard “look at me, I like to gatekeep” people won’t like Breaking Point 2 for one reason or another. However, it is arguably one of the more enjoyable fictionalized stories linked to something on TV/sports-drama in a while. That’s a nice way of saying wrestling games rarely have great story modes.

Where F1 23 stands out this year is Breaking Point season 2 with the same solid racing at the heart of it. Despite my disagreements with the whiff of live service surrounding it, the F1 World element is solid too. It is also frustrating though, with a couple of bugs that I hope are patched fairly quickly.

The lack of “immersion” to the re-introduction of the red flag and the Compendium nonsense are things I could do without. When working well, F1 23 offers some of the best racing experiences you’ll have, and if you can wrangle 19 other people who won’t cut corners only to be disqualified from 10th place, it delivers some heart-pounding action at its best.

A PC review copy of F1® 23 – Deluxe Edition was provided by Electronic Arts for this review.

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F1 2023

$69.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Same solid racing as always.
• A decent story and engaging gameplay in Breaking Point season 2.
• Red Flags return.
• A plethora of game modes to enjoy.

Cons

• Not the best performance all-round.
• Can be extremely buggy in select situations.
• Is that more live service I smell?