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Last year’s F1 Manager 2023 was a resounding success by most metrics. It took the solid but somewhat barebones foundations laid down by the first game and massively iterated on it, adding in plenty of new features and quality-of-life updates to really bring the game together. But while last year’s game came on leaps and bounds from its predecessor, F1 Manager 2024 has taken baby steps in comparison.
Perhaps the biggest addition is the new Create A Team option, letting you choose your drivers, and customise your team’s colours, livery, race suits, and logo. It’s not just cosmetic, however, as you can effectively choose a story for your team. Are you a scrappy new team working your way up from the bottom, or are you an established team, flush with cash and already competing for championships? It adds a nice bit of variety on top of simply choosing from an already existing team, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to compare your saves with friends.
On top of that, fans of longer-term saves will be pleased to see the inclusion of driver affiliates. You can now recruit drivers to compete in F2 and F3, who will slowly progress over time with the end goal of being called up to your F1 team when the time is right. This is especially important as teams will now keep tabs on all your drivers and look to poach them if they’re performing particularly well, so having a couple of potential backup drivers is a smart idea. That being said, prevention is better than cure, and keeping your drivers happy is the best way to stop them from heading to other teams, which leads us swiftly onto the mentality system.
For me, the mentality system is the single most important feature added to this year’s game. Your drivers and key staff now have a morale system. Higher morale means higher confidence, which in turn means higher stats and better performance on the track. Of course, this conversely means that bad morale will lead to worse performances. Mentality can be affected by anything from race performance and how well you manage the team to whether or not they get on with their engineers.
At the start of my season, Alex Albon and Yuki Tsunoda were my two drivers. On paper, Albon should have been finishing above Tsunoda. But two poor races at the start of the season saw him finishing several places off his expected seventh place, causing him to miss his targets. His morale plummeted. To remedy this, I changed my approach in the next few races. I prioritised Tsunoda, who was in relatively good spirits, to try and push for him to finish higher, while I lowered Albon’s targets to something more manageable.
And it worked swimmingly. Tsunoda managed to push on from eighth to a couple of respectable sixth-place finishes. Meanwhile, Albon met his targets twice in a row and was back in the groove. In our next race, some excellent driving from Albon and a fortunate penalty for Verstappen meant we took pole position, something that seemed impossible only a few races beforehand. Do not underestimate how massively a good mentality can affect your success.
But mentality giveth and mentality taketh away. Another couple of races into Albon’s hot streak and he was ahead of the pack by some margin when a crash brought the safety car out. As soon as the race restarted, he dropped down to third. That’s a hit to mentality. Another couple of laps and he slipped to fourth, then fifth, each one tearing a chunk into his morale and bringing on more mistakes. I tried to encourage him to drive more aggressively, hoping that a couple of overtakes might bump his morale up a bit, but the damage was seemingly done, and by the time the chequered flag puts us out of our misery, he’s dropped all the way to 12th.
It’s a great system in theory, and when it’s working for you, it feels great. But on the flip side, when the negatives kick in, it feels like an almost unassailable threat to your race, and one that can potentially derail your entire season. I think it needs a bit more fine-tuning to make negative morale less punishing, but also good morale less powerful.
The game has made the customary updates to enhance realism. Mechanical failures have been added to the game, requiring you to either pit to get your engineers to take a look, or stay out on the track and risk having to retire if something goes catastrophically wrong. You’ll have options during the race to lower your chances of a failure, such as avoiding high-risk kerbs. But you can also take on more risk, driving more aggressively to climb the pack. Balancing your failure points with your driving strategy is a fine line, but adds some much-needed drama to the gameplay.
Whether or not F1 Manager 2024 is enough of an improvement on last year’s game to make it worthwhile is still up for debate. For some, Create A Team is all you’ll need to hear, but if you’re not interested in that, the only real addition is the mentality system, which as we’ve discussed, has its ups and downs. Meanwhile, many of the other additions we haven’t even discussed, such as choosing your sponsors, simulating races, and new camera angles, aren’t exactly game-changing new features.
If you’re a fan of the series, then you’re going to be a fan of this one. If you’re looking to try it out for the first time, then there’s no doubt that this is the best game the series has to offer. But if you’re still enjoying F1 Manager 2023 and wondering if it’s worth upgrading to the latest iteration right away, I don’t think it is. For the most part, it’s the same old F1 Manager that players have come to love over the last few years, but for me, that’s part of the problem.
About the Author
F1 Manager 2024
- Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X
- Genre(s): Racing, Simulation, Strategy
