F1 Team Manager 2022 Review: The Reborn Me is Binoto

After a wonderful 2021 season, this year's F1 Grand Prix has attracted more new and old car fans to come to the screen to pay attention to this world's highest level track racing event. The addition of the first Chinese F1 driver Zhou Guanyu and Ferrari's brief strong performance at the beginning of the season have directly filled people's expectations for this season.

The season has now entered the second half, and Ferrari's impression has become a series of clown performances and meme pictures. The timely release of the new strategy simulation game "F1 Team Manager 2022" at the end of August provides players and car fans with an opportunity to become team leaders and rewrite the 2022 season. Therefore, this game is also known as——

Reborn Me as Binoto

Matthia Binoto, Ferrari team leader

Enter the arena

Although it can be seen from the name, it should be emphasized at the beginning that F1 Team Manager 2022 has complete F1, F2, and F3 licenses, which means that all the cars, drivers, tracks, and key team members in the game are presented in real images. This is very important for creating a gaming atmosphere, as it does bring you a sense of immersion and tension from the beginning, waiting in the team workspace for the race to start and proceed.

However, even with fully authorized real modeling, the graphics in this game can only be considered relatively average. As a strategy and simulation game that requires a large space (about 18GB), it will not leave you with any stunning visual experience. But if you are a long-term player of the Football Manager series, playing F1 Team Manager 2022 is enough to make you burst into tears. You should know that the previous game in this category that kept up with the times in terms of visual performance can be traced back to 2013's FIFA Manager 14.

A good sense of immersion stems from many details in the game. The game provides a full TV broadcast perspective for the competition, and the difference between watching an in game game race and watching a real race is not significant. All team calls between drivers and teams are also taken from the audio source of this season's real race, and there is also a commentary in Chinese throughout the race.

However, as the game time prolongs, players will gradually discover more and more doubts from these initially exciting content. Although Chinese explanations are enjoyable, when an accident occurs, the commentary becomes inexplicable. In the broadcast perspective, strange movements of racing cars can often be seen, and sometimes even models can be worn. When there are multiple collision accidents in a race, you are likely to find different cars colliding in the same way at the same corner, resulting in the same outcome, and these accident prone cars are surprisingly durable.

A collision accident

I have reason to suspect that there are actually no physical effects in the game engine of this game. The 3D game graphics are only generated based on the game engine's calculation of the game situation, so it cannot create more detailed vehicle accident and damage effects. The game engine can only select specific cars to cause scripted accidents. For example, extreme scenes such as Mick Schumacher's race car breaking in two at Monaco this year, and the terrifying Zhou Guanyu's race car overturning and sliding accident at Silverstone won't have a chance to occur.

Mick Schumacher's Crash in Monaco

For various considerations, this design and approach is understandable. After all, it is very difficult to fully simulate the driving conditions and various component conditions of 20 racing cars. However, this also shows us that the authenticity of this game cannot be explored too deeply.

Control strategy

I believe that for some players, getting their supporting drivers and teams to win the championship of the year is just a secondary purpose of purchasing "F1 Team Manager 2022". More importantly, after witnessing Ferrari's multiple suffocation strategies this season, using this game to prove that there are all clowns in Ferrari's P room, I can do it myself.

This is the most exciting part of the real F1 Grand Prix and this game, the race day. For non deep viewers of F1, a major concern when purchasing this game is whether their limited understanding of competition rules and strategies will affect the gaming experience, and whether it will lead to continuous failures making everything very difficult. Thanks to concise but effective tutorials, players can quickly understand what they need to do at each moment of the season and a single race, what rules to follow, and experience the fun of managing a team.

The competition weekend is divided into three parts, namely the three practice matches on Friday and Saturday, the qualifying match on Saturday, and the main match on Sunday. The practice race is mainly for the team to adjust the racing car and provide feedback to the drivers. Vehicle tuning is similar to a small game in this game, where players can adjust 5 settings that will be reflected in 5 performance indicators in different ways. Drivers will provide feedback on their confidence in the current setting, as well as the specific performance and room for improvement in the 5 areas, through practice races.

It may seem complicated, but in reality, it's about using a puzzle like game to keep all performance within the optimal range given by the driver, in order to gain higher driver confidence. High driver confidence, as well as familiarity with high components and tracks, will give drivers additional skill points in this race.

Shunting is an essential part of racing games, but in this game there are some contradictions and ambiguities. On the one hand, the degree of adjustment of the front and rear wings should be the result of joint adjustment and agreement between the driver and the engineer, so as not to let the team leader inquire about the detailed settings of the two cars separately. On the other hand, tuning is likely to have a significant impact on the performance of the car on various tracks, rather than just bringing a small amount of skill rewards to the driver.

Slightly playful shunting

In the qualifying round, it is the field where players can freely apply their strategies. When to release the car for the race, how many results to achieve in each of the three qualifying rounds (if you can enter the last two rounds), whether to use one car to interfere with the opponent's flying circle to gain an advantage for the other, and whether to leave a new set of soft tires for the main race in the third qualifying round are all up to you to decide. Of course, if you want to focus on the main race, you can also skip qualifying and simulate everything.

In the main competition, the ever-changing arena will directly test the player's strategic planning and on-site reaction ability. Each station in the game provides players with three sets of default tires and entry strategies. Changing tires based on the given tire plan and entry window is naturally the simplest and most brainless choice, but the situation on the field will force you to make changes. When a driver makes a mistake that leads to a sharp decline in ranking, when the front wing of the car is damaged after a collision, and when a safety car is deployed due to an accident on the track, whether to continue with the previous plan or make any temporary changes will become the key decision to determine the outcome of the race.

Set strategy

In order to allow players to carefully arrange the strategic details of two racing cars, the game provides a pause function, so that you have more space to think about what to do next. At the same time, if the competition progress is lackluster or the outcome is determined, you can also make the competition process play at double speed, with a maximum of 16 times early completion.

Although it is a simulation game, like many similar works, this game cannot guarantee a high degree of reproduction of real game situations. After a period of playing the game, players can discover some unreasonable aspects in the game engine and apply them.

The two obvious issues in the main race of F1 Team Manager 2022 are that the speed of hard tires is not much slower than that of the softer two sets of tires, and they are very durable, making the one stop strategy the brainless optimal strategy for most tracks. Another issue is that the role of DRS is too strong. During races, several cars that are close in position often rely on DRS to repeatedly overtake and switch positions in more than a dozen laps. Poor performing cars also often use DRS to tightly hold onto the front car and maintain the gap, which is very headache inducing.

On the contrary, the rain station, which should have been relatively chaotic, has become a situation where players are more likely to rely on strategy to win. As long as they seize the opportunity of rain and the dry track to grab the first station, it is easy to gain an advantage. Whether these advantages can be maintained until the end and turn into victory is another matter. Although as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the types of vehicle accidents during the competition are fixed and the number is relatively small, sudden accidents can still make you feel flustered and even regretful after the race.

Everything is under control

... until an error is detected

Speaking of which, players familiar with F1 should also notice that there is no sprint race on the weekend of this game, and all sprint races in the actual racing calendar have been removed. Each race is in the form of practice, qualifying, and regular races. Formally speaking, this is the biggest restoration problem in this work. In addition, there are also stages where the safety car is not allowed to be overtaken and unsealed by the trapped vehicle before the end of the safety car.

Next season

Outside of race days, the main job of players is to manage the team's budget, provide mid season upgrades for the racing cars, or conduct advance research for the next season's racing cars. In addition, there are arrangements for team personnel, as well as some work related to team facilities and sponsors. Overall, this is also the most lacking part of the game.

Due to the inherent characteristics of F1 as a racing sport, it is difficult for game works based on this theme to effectively expand the game content to the second, third, and subsequent seasons after this year. Because the game launched in the middle of the year cannot foresee the rule adjustments, race car appearance, and track schedule for the next season. So the car upgrade kit developed by players during the season cannot directly lead to changes in the appearance details of the car as in reality, and the cars in the following seasons will not differ in appearance from the first season.

The development and upgrading of racing cars in the game will only bring positive effects, and there will be no negative upgrades with poor performance. This allows players to steadily and gradually improve their racing cars, from the end to the middle, and even the top, which can be expected. The only difference is the number of seasons consumed. A better racing car means better results, which will bring more sponsorship and budget. With more budget, better drivers and staff can be recruited, and the racing car and team facilities can be upgraded more efficiently. This is an easy to understand positive loop, which is often difficult to implement in reality and easy to achieve in games.

mid season research and development

You won't see teams like this season's Mercedes Benz racing team in the game that, due to a wrong research and development direction, were originally competing for the championship last season, but soon after the start of this year's race, they basically announced their withdrawal from the championship race; This year, the Haas team also spent a significant portion of their already limited budget on car repairs due to multiple collisions with Mick Schumacher.

I don't want to encounter more setbacks, but the lack of uncertainty clearly affects the legendary and replayable gameplay of the player's career in F1 Team Manager 2022.

At the same time, the player's personal career also appears to be lacking in content and somewhat monotonous. There are no media interviews with drivers and team leaders, no news or rumors about the movements of other teams, and no F2 and F3 race results. Team members and drivers will not express their opinions to you, and you do not need to pay attention to their attitudes or make commitments.

The content in the inbox is quite monotonous

There is no design for the game regarding the feature of "paid drivers". In reality, every racing driver comes with some corporate sponsorship to some extent, and some even rely entirely on the strong "recharge" of the sponsor to stay in this sport, but this is not reflected in the game at all. When signing, you can only see how much salary and bonus a driver will spend, but you can't see any positive impact on the season budget.

After players have figured out the various characteristics inside and outside the game, the already limited daily work content combined with the ability to fast forward 16 times allows a season to reach the finish line at an extremely fast speed.

, I really hope there can be more content like this

This also allows us to give a review of this game. It's easy for you to think at a certain point in time that "this is the F1 strategy simulation game I want," but soon after, you may feel that it lacks meaning. This is quite regrettable, and it's not too much of a fault for the development team.

You should know that the last game under the title of "F1 Team Manager" was "F1 Team Manager 2001" released by EA and DICE back then. It is understandable that this new game, which started from scratch, has various problems. Although sports games are often perceived by players as having limited annual changes, today's Football Manager is an iterative version of Champion Football Manager 0304. Many features and gameplay rely on years of continuous upgrades and modifications to reach a generally accepted level.

F1 Team Manager 2001

Frontier Developments, the game developer of this game, is a company with rich experience in simulation and strategy game development, and works such as Roller Coaster Star and Jurassic World were created by them. If "F1 Team Manager" can continue as a series in the future for a long time, I believe it will also continue to bring progress to the gaming experience.