Call me an idiot all you want, but I do get excited for newFormula 1game releases. Yes, it’s likely going to be the same thing all over again, and no, it’s seldom worth the AAA price tag, but that makes it so lifelike! After all, in what other sport can you spend obscene amounts of money just to see Verstappen win it again anyway?
And yet, despite my love for the series, EA’s tenure over the F1 games has started to feel a little bit like any Monaco GP —beautiful, iconic, and honestly kind of fun, but not quite worth it.
Of course, some of the repetitiveness is inherent to a yearly release that’s closely based on real life. There’s only so much that can change without a significant transformation in the sport.
Enough of me getting hopeful for F1 26, though. We’re here to talk about F1 25, a game that does everything that’s expected of it, but leaves you wondering if that’s all there is to the virtual F1 pilot life.
A Long Formation Lap
I might be giving away my age a little here, but modern Formula 1 in the Drive To Survive era is a completely different animal from what I grew up with. We’re talking F1 2000, with Placebo’s “Every You, Every Me” as the main menu soundtrack.
Formula 1 was always all the glitz and glam, occasionally attracting the disdain (or jealousy, you decide) of fans and drivers alike from other series.
EA Sports' 2025 entry is not shy about leaning into the Netflix vision of racing’s premier category.From the menu designs to the multiple cutscenes and incredibly smooth transitions, every action you take in F1 25 reminds you of the level you’re racing at here.
That focus on beautiful presentation is so heavy that at one point, I audibly groaned, “Can I please race already?”
Take the career mode, for example. Once you select a driver, the game throws you into a custom cutscene where your agent walks you through the contract details. You get some input into those, but the jump between the fully-voiced scenes to the menus where you do that is seamless.
Oscar Piastri 8th In F1 25 Rankings Despite Real-Life Championship Lead
The lead McLaren driver has some points to make up.
However, that focus on beautiful presentation is so heavy that at one point, I audibly groaned, “Can I please race already?” I understand the importance of setting the scene and the work that goes into building that up, but you should not feel like you’re in a conspiracy with the explicit goal of keeping you from burning rubber.
A reasonable amount of this fluff is tied to tutorials, but that’s also something that didn’t feel very right. I understand that for some, this will be the introduction to Formula 1 games, and potentially even the series, but EA Sports cannot seriously believe that its audience is this helpless.
I’m not exaggerating when I say almost every menu in F1 25 triggers a tutorial voiceover.This is not an overly complex game, especially when compared to other racing titles, so it would have been nice to be asked whether I need all this aggressive handholding before it kicks off.
Carbon Fiber and V6 Hybrids
Once you are done with the endless wall of tutorials, the game rewards you with stunning visuals.Codemaster’s latest iteration of the EGO engine comes alive on the PlayStation 5, with incredible looks married to extremely smooth performance.Codemastersis working on a mature platform, and that expertise shows.
I can’t help but feel a little jealous of the PC players, though. F1 25 is gettingpath tracingfor Windows, and what I’ve seen of it in other games looks fantastic. That said, the ray-traced lighting on the PlayStation 5 is still rock solid, and I appreciate that the developers decided to roll it out slowly rather than an untested wide deployment.
The cars in F1 25 are recreated beautifully, with the fine differences between each modelaccurately replicated. It might be pedantic, but that’s something that always bothered me when trying ersatz F1 classes in other games. In iRacing, for example, a Red Bull is the same as any other car beneath the paint (except it’s 100 times more likely to cause a collision).
For a game that’s so focused on personalities,it was delightful to see the human models not look like PlayStation 3 monstrosities that escaped a lab.You don’t get to see faces all that often, but when you do, they don’t feel like a jumpscare.
The good looks go well with the audio. My previous F1 experiences were on PC with headphones on, but I was happy to see the game adapts rather well to TV speakers. Today’s V6 hybrid engines still sound like wet farts next to the V10 banshees of yore, but that’s not something Codemasters can fix. Of course, headphones will always sound better, but that’s not exactly news.
The voice acting holds up well across the board, especially Marc Priestley’s angelic voice seductively telling me to stop cutting corners unless I want a 5-second penalty.
Now,as lovely as the audiovisual experience is, just about all of it was already there in F1 24.It’s a treat for anyone getting into the series now, but veterans won’t really be impressed by this stuff, especially for $59.99 and a handshake.
Lights Out And Away We Go
What’s that, you’re feeling annoyed that the racing experience is only being talked about two sections in? That’s how I felt trying to reach a race in F1 25.
I’m not a fan ofracing on controllers, but for all the failings of the medium compared to an FFB wheel on a mount,the DualSensetries hard to give you a good haptic experience.
The right stick controlling the camera feels beyond natural, and much better than any solution short of VR or head-tracking.
Rather than cop out, I picked my usual settings: everything fully simulated, except for the pitstop release because my clutch game is shamefully bad. That also means the cockpit camera with the solid halo bar.
Despite the limited movement range of the controller trigger versus a traditional pedal,it was nice to see that the cars no longer spin out instantly when applying throttle. This tendency had professional drivers playing the game with the lowest level of traction assist on even when using full rigs, and it has been improved to the point that even controllers don’t need it anymore.
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For when the checkered flag just isn’t enough.
As in the 2025 reason, my very first race was at Melbourne, playing the role of Carlos Sainz in a Williams. It was a little jarring to see a Williams car with the MFD on the wheel after so many years of being contrarian and bolting it to the dash.
When running zero assists, the stiffness of the DualSense left stick struggles with how sensitive F1 cars are. I struggled a fair bit with minute corrections, and as much as I kept telling myself that even the real Carlos Sainz crashed in Melbourne, it was a painful GP. That was a P18 debut, helped by the abysmal performance of the Saubers that ended up behind me.
It was nice to see that the cars no longer spin out instantly when applying throttle.
One of the main marketing points of F1 25 is the laser-scanned tracks. I won’t get into the economics of it and how that’s punished smaller developers since that’s outside the scope of the game. The DualSense haptic feedback helped appreciate it a little bit, but although extra fidelity is nice, it’s hard to argue that it makes it worth the price tag.
The driver AI in F1 25 feels a little less inclined to commit homicidethan last year’s version, though I still had a few hairy moments here and there.
While those are more minor changes, the race engineer was fortunately tweaked. F1 24 had the friendly voice on the radio giving advice that felt completely nonsensical, but this year’s edition seems to have patched that up.
That’s not to say every bit of race engineer feedback is perfect, but it’s a lot less annoying, which is a major win when you’re doing 20 laps getting bad feedback.
Modes For Days
A big selling point for F1 25 is the number of modes the game throws at you. You get to play online, the regular driver career, a fully-revamped team management career, the third part of Braking Point, and a cool little tie-in with Brad Pitt’s Formula 1 movie that’s coming out in late June.
My favorite mode in every previous edition was the driver career, and that hasn’t really changed.I liked that I could choose to play the role of a real driver and attempt to live through the trials and tribulations of their career this season.
The fact that the game comes out mid-season gives the developer a bigger dataset to fine-tune the performance of the cars, though this year we thankfully don’t have any deadweight like the 2021 Haas.
In this virtual world, Jack Doohan is still there, but I’m sure digital Franco Colapinto will come in an update.
The presentation this year is excellent, with little details like the real pilots running certain radio lines throughout the session. If you’re so inclined, you can add in either the fictional team from Braking Point or the F1 movie to the career, which is a nice little warmup for upcoming seasons.
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Pfft, who even slows down around corners?
The team creator, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air, augmented by a custom decal system that finally does away with the abhorrent generic stencils the game forced you to use before.
Rather than just being a copy of the pilot career with a couple of extra menus, My Team actually gives you things to think about when managing your team.It was nice to have more granular control of upgrades, even if it took a little time to understand the balance of things.
To get a tangible improvement on the track, you need to invest in facilities, research, and development before it makes it to the car, rather than just buying the finished product and calling it a day. If you like longer career runs, it makes you think whether you want to spend your allowance on a part that’ll be ready faster this season, or help build the foundation for a stronger challenge in the next.
Braking Point remains a mixed bag for me. I appreciate the concept and the production value that goes into it, but all that does little to compensate for how scripted the entire racing part of it is.Every year I try Braking Point, I find myself missing FIFA 17’s The Journey.
I understand that it is a story mode after all, but at this point, I wonder whether it would be better served as its own little direct-to-TV film.
For the first time, you sometimes have the choice of whether you want to run a segment as Callie Mayer or Casper Akkerman. Other times, you get to play both of them in tandem in the same race. It’s a nice touch that adds a new perspective to a race, but the whole affair still feels too formulaic for me.
Judging yearly releases like the F1 series is a little different from your average standalone game.
During my time with F1 25, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game did not get worse in any way, which is something that occasionally plagued similar series likeThe Game Formerly Known As FIFA.
I feel the game is still a little light on improvements and new features for the price tag, butthe handling changes are a paradigm shift for those chasing a more realistic Formula 1 racing experience. It’s hard to overstate how nice it is to be able to hit that throttle on the exit without losing the rear every other corner.
Braking Point brings a bit of that Drive to Survive aura into the game, and the F1 movie collab is a nice touch that helps tie that project into the series. However, I doubt anyone will be buying F1 25 for that.
F1 25 comes out on May 30th for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and X, but owners of the Iconic Edition can get in on the action today.
Closing Comments
EA Sports and Codemasters have conjured what is the best Formula 1 game to date. The problem here is that they do this every other year, without error. F1 25 has beautiful graphics, a bombastic presentation that sometimes overshadows the actual racing, and handling improvements that finally do away with half a decade of bad habits in the series. If you are chasing a realistic Formula 1 racing experience and sink over a hundred hours into this game yearly, these changes are enough to justify the price. However, for most players, especially those running controllers or with multiple assists on, this is just $59.99 to have a slightly more polished experience than F1 24. Here’s hoping the 2026 regulations bring the change that both virtual and real series need.
Reviewed on PlayStation 5
