F1 Manager 2024 Review (PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, & PC)

Getting behind the wheel of a high-speed automobile is quite ecstatic. But so is managing a squad and watching your strategies pay off. F1 Manager 2024 is determined to capture the thrill of the latter, ushering in a fresh annual entry for fans of the open-wheel, single-seater racing experience. 

As wild cheers echo through the stands, you’ll sit back and enjoy the effort put into crafting the best team. But to enjoy the ultimate experience, you need intuitive menus and seamless mechanics. Also, being an annual franchise, updates, and tweaks made on the predecessor’s gameplay need to prove worth your time and money. 

We’ve put these aspects into consideration, compiling our thoughts on the new entry in our F1 Manager 2024 review.

Create a Team

For the first time ever, you can create your own team. It’s a wonder how the feature wasn’t already available, seeing as nearly all management simulation games have it. But yes, finally, you can create your own team from scratch. Of course, you can still choose one of the ten official Formula One teams. But that’s a feature that has been present in previous iterations in Career mode. So, effortlessly, many gamers will want to tinker their way around what’s new. 

For the 11th team, you can create a fictional team and customize a wealth of options. You can choose your team’s origin story, crafting a unique tale about your team on and off the track. Perhaps you want them to embody a rags-to-riches story, where you start small with low funding and climb your way up the ladder. What your team lacks in funding, they’ll more than makeup for in skill and resilience. Or perhaps you want them to be rookies from the Red Bull academy, determined to achieve set goals. With funding from a maverick entrepreneur, you’ll take on challenging races and make a name for yourself. 

Alternatively, you can have a brilliant car but with no budget and reputation. Or be a veteran racer who has returned to prove they still have what it takes to win. F1 Manager 2024 provides a host of wide-ranging story arcs, including a free-form option to choose the budget, strength of cards, and levels of individual racers for yourself. Depending on your origin story, you’ll take on unique challenges. And, with distinct experiences, you enjoy high replayability that pushes you to experiment with all origin stories possible.

Build a Legacy

But the high level of customization F1 Manager 2024 offers doesn’t stop there. It gives you free reign over your team’s brand. You can customize your team’s name, logo, uniforms, and more. Thanks to an in-depth tool editor, you can design unique creations that show off your style and taste. It goes deep into the shapes, letters, colors, scale, patterns, sponsors’ logos, and more. But also, you can choose from pre-designed logos and livery for gamers struggling with the nitty-gritty of your team’s identity. 

Onward, you’ll be free to choose racers from an overwhelming roster of F1 superstars and F2 and F3 rookies. But you can also create new racers, ramping their skill and reputation up the leaderboards the more you play. A lot of thought goes into choosing racers, including budget. If you want Lewis Hamilton on your team, for example, you’re going to need a reputable sponsor with big bucks to spare. And this is where the Mentality comes in that essentially, keeps track of how happy your racers are.

Alongside a robust team, you want to hire staff to ensure races run seamlessly behind the scenes. They must be paid too. And, to tie all the management systems with a bow, you want to choose the right engine manufacturers to ensure your cars perform at their optimum. All customization options combined add meat to the bone of Create a Team. You’ll be forced to prioritize specific features like fuel efficiency or hiring more staff to manufacture car parts faster. All along, Create a Team gives you plenty of ways to fine-tune your gameplay and really take the time to plan out the perfect strategy. 

More or Less the Same

Otherwise, F1 Manager 2024 is more or less the same as its predecessor, F1 Manager 2023. Sure, Create a Team gives you free reign over a fictional 11th team. But the core gameplay eventually waters down to be the same as controlling one of the ten real-life F1 teams. You essentially take on different racing challenges, scooping up World Championships and climbing your way up the ladder. And along the way, you upgrade your cars and research better car parts. The only difference in Create a Team is the starting point of your team. Still, it’s a nice way to pit self-created teams against well-established real-life ones.

At first glance, the UI, graphics, and music score look the same. Although the UI is more intuitive to find your way around. You hardly feel the sting of micro-managing itsy-bitsy individual team features. Instead, once you’ve set up your team, they slip into the main campaign structure, with only direct management going toward upgrades or research of better car parts. As for damage on impact, it can use a little more realism.

Additionally, features like the freedom to replay races return alongside more or less the same racing challenges via exclusive scenarios. Different scenarios challenge you to think outside the box. You can have simpler ones, like racing against a team with the same car performance. But you can also have more specialized ones, like finding a way to bypass a mechanical fault and still win the race. 

F1 Manager 2024 also retains management of staff, including upgrading their skills and poaching new ones. You still schedule monthly training for your pit crew. However, you need to keep track of their mentality meter, to ensure that you don’t overwork them and cause them to make costly mistakes. 

Price to Pay

Sponsors still present you with key performance targets they’d like you to meet in exchange for extra cash. And while the core concept has remained the same, F1 Manager 2024 is more dynamic, allowing you to craft new deals mid-season. It steepens the risk-versus-reward of choosing between spending cash on costly races that may not reap fruit. Also, you don’t want to overwhelm your racers with too many challenges, or they may burn out and perform poorly. 

All the while, you need to keep your cars’ performance at optimum consistently. Car tyres, fuel, and battery are the main stats to keep track of. Ideally, you want to maintain them between races. But also, while racing, instructing racers to speed up can cause tyres to burn through faster. You can instruct racers to use electric boosts. But if you overuse it, they may be at a disadvantage when it runs out and cause the competition to overtake them. 

Meanwhile, you have general car maintenance like car engines, switching out faulty car parts, and so on, all requiring money and all necessary to scoop up more wins. But money isn’t always the solution, either. You can buy more engines, which are often hefty, but you can also get penalties for doing so. It makes engine maintenance all the more important in saving money, and it feels rewarding. One of the ways you can do so is by keeping track of overheating. 

On and Off Track

And so, F1 Manager 2024 constantly has you juggling lots of tools and systems on and off the track. On the track, you have replays that show you which racers are experiencing issues. Although the replays don’t really indicate what the specific problem is, it’s still a nice way to stay on top of your game. But to avoid trouble altogether, you can ensure racers practice precautionary guidelines. Off track, you’re tracking down sponsors and negotiating new contracts. Some contracts will take weeks to take effect. Thus, you need to ensure you still have efficient staff on payroll.

Verdict

F1 Manager 2024 may just be the third game in the F1 Manager franchise. But it sure does maintain consistency providing the ultimate F1 management experience. It puts you in the shoes of a Team Principal, giving you capped budgets and a wealth of customization options to craft the best team. You’re pushed to take several factors into consideration, such as car performance, staff mentality, consequent output, upgrades through research and development, and more. 

While F1 2024 could give you a relatively similar experience, F1 Manager 2024 narrows it down into a much simpler and more focused playthrough. It allows you to experience just how demanding the behind-the-scenes of F1 racing can be. And in the same breath, gifting you with the thrill of watching your strategies play out on the race track. With fine-tuning of returning features from the predecessor, F1 Manager 2023, and the satisfyingly in-depth Create a Team management system, F1 Manager 2024 crafts a management simulation experience that fans of the genre will love.