at first glance, F1 23 is a massive improvement over its predecessor. now featuring a more refined traction model and physics, these new cars have never been more of a blast to drive (5th gear spins begone!), especially in tracks like the incredibly fast and flowing Losail circuit, and the, whatever-it-is of the new Las Vegas circuit, but it's not perfect by any means. far from it.

braking point 2, while feeling a bit more fleshed out in some areas compared to its predecessor, suffers from character writing and development that seems like it was written by an 11 year old in their bedroom after watching drive to survive one too many times. cool to play once, not sure if i'll be coming back to it sometime soon.

the newly introduced F1 World seems like a cross between FIFA's (or FC now, i guess) infamous FUT and the series' now iconic myteam career mode. here you are able to level up a generic looking multiplayer car with multiple parts and resources which are unlocked by just playing the game and leveling up a battle pass-type system, it's cool for what it is, but it becomes way too easy after a couple of visits, as parts always are above a specific level and never really dip in tech level and gameplay difficulty, so you are just better off installing whatever has the highest tech level, and the single player events are too much of a breeze for anyone who's played the game for more than a few hours. thankfully, it does not replace the standard multiplayer modes (open lobbies, time trial, etc), and progress is tracked across all of these. at least it seems like codemasters has partnered with a few real life teams to bring some cool special edition liveries to these cars, which is a plus.

there are quite a few bugs that might dampen the experience a little bit, the much requested red flags being affected primarily at launch, for example, and other bugs present in previous games that were patched seem to make their way on here, somehow. career mode gets virtually no updates whatsoever, which might make it incredibly frustrating for those returning fans who just wanna feel like they are part of their favorite F1 team, existing or not.

in short it might be best to wait for a couple of discounts, given its exuberantly high entry price in most retailers and countries and for some of these bugs to be fixed (granted, they're nothing particularly game breaking, but they are a tad bit annoying), and if you play or decide to play competitively, there's no doubt that the game has a huge cheating problem, which has made esports and league racing tough to follow for the past few months, and i hope that codemasters are working on an anti-cheat system to prevent this from happening.

these fixes, along with planned updates like the typical performance patch, the 2022 F2 season, and the addition of the updated Marina Bay street circuit, should hopefully make this game even greater than what it is right now, cause this might just be the best and most fun F1 game since F1 2020. time will tell.

Reviewed on Jul 12, 2023


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