Admittedly, I enjoy direct control in racing games more than anything else, but the F1 Manager series has interested me just as much to work in the background. It can be just as exciting to see a daring overtaking pay off from the pit wall as it is to burn rubber yourself, and in between races, concentrating on team building and general strategy can be rejuvenating. Although F1 Manager 2024 is essentially your standard yearly update, preferring to make small adjustments rather than significant ones, a number of those adjustments make developer Frontier’s most recent management simulation even more appealing.
The most notable addition for this year is the brand-new “Create a Team” tool, which provides an incredibly wide variety of customizing possibilities. For instance, different engine manufacturers include essential strategies that require you to choose between factors like fuel efficiency and durability. In-depth customization is also available for team uniforms and liveries, with a good selection of pre-made designs that are helpful for those like me who are not that artistic. The choice of how to establish the history of your team, which dictates your overarching objectives, is among the most intriguing ones. You have a lot of options, such as being the hungry upstart who is willing to sacrifice everything to win, or the small team with strong experience but little money. You can gladly disregard these selections if you would prefer to start completely on your terms. These options realistically affect your total chances.
I understand how challenging it is to create your team in F1 Manager 2024 without first choosing an origin. You can choose to start close to the front or move up from backmarkers to eventual champions based on differences in initial budgets, car performance settings, and facility qualities. Of course, you can’t set every facility to five stars immediately, which still keeps things balanced. There’s a hard limit for improvement points, too, so choosing between improved race performance, manufacturing speed for car parts, or even the HQ’s helipad provides welcome depth.
Selecting a constructor in earlier games was essentially a silent difficulty setting because a team’s performance in the game corresponded to their real-life counterpart. That is why I found it more enticing to select midfield rivals like Alpine when I was looking for a challenge. While winning is always satisfying, it is far more satisfying to put in the work to improve your squad and achieve victories than to pick Red Bull and walk away with the win. The fact that F1 Manager 2024 keeps the post-launch difficulty levels from 2023 for race days and your opponents’ car development is another thing that pleases me, as it makes more teams playable right away.
You can personalize the starting team quality in Create A Team by choosing the ‘Your Story’ origin. You can choose any staff members and drivers you want. An eleventh team that can sign current Formula 1 drivers, or even rookies in Formula 2 and Formula 3, would be a wonderful way to change things up in a year where the driver lineup is essentially the same as the previous season. Instead of going straight for Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, I signed Nico Hulkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda to get them their first podium results.
You can personalize the starting team quality in Create A Team by choosing the ‘Your Story’ origin. You can choose any staff members and drivers you want. An eleventh team that can sign current Formula 1 drivers, or even rookies in Formula 2 and Formula 3, would be a wonderful way to change things up in a year where the driver lineup is essentially the same as the previous season. Instead of going straight for Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, I signed Nico Hulkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda to get them their first podium results.
There is always pressure to keep going because, at the end of the season, the board evaluates your performance about its expectations, and the cycle repeats itself in the following year.
Finally, race replays are back if you are looking for something different. While it is acceptable that they typically involve bettering your selected team’s actual performance throughout the race, the more specialized events add intrigue to the mix by presenting less plausible possibilities, such as assigning equal performance parameters to each team. The most enjoyable events are those that push your strategic thinking to the limit, such as finding out how to lead Ferrari to victory in Italy despite a last-minute mechanical issue.
Verdict
Even though F1 Manager 2024 is a nice third installment, it still has some of the drawbacks associated with being an annual series. Strong customization choices are provided by new features like forming your team, and winning with a customized team is much more satisfying than improving an already-existing one. Additionally, the expanding sponsorship networks and mechanical flaws offer much-needed strategic depth. This is still Frontier’s best attempt at a Formula 1 management model yet, despite a few lingering problems like collision damage and a laborious contracts system that could use more work.
