You’re also supposed to believe that, most of the time, the driver is able to carry on and only suffered front wing damage. Almost all of them see a driver plough straight on into a barrier without even appearing to brake. It’s the single car crashes which don’t look at all believable.

The ones involving multiple cars are better produced, even if they all look eerily similar to one another. What is harder to excuse is the animations of crashes. That’s not a huge shock though if you’ve ever played or watched a video of a Football Manager game since the animations of players are a lot stiffer in that series than they are in FIFA. There are sudden and violent steering inputs from the drivers when pulling out to overtake another driver and in general, the motion of the cars is not as smooth as you would get if you watched a race replay from a normal racing game. In motion, though the game isn’t nearly as stunning. Graphically the game is impressive for a management title and pre-release the game has generated quite a lot of hype from some of the early screenshots that have been shared. Even during a race, you’ll get brief snippets of commentary from Croft, accompanied by a replay you can choose to watch, whenever there’s some action on the circuit such as a lock-up, crash or a positional change for one of your drivers. You’ll also hear David Croft and Karun Chandhok introducing each session and providing a bit of analysis on what’s happened previously. There’s no doubting their attempts at that with the on-track presentation as the game replicates, not just the FOM TV graphics, but also the camera angles used including trackside ones as well as a handful of selectable onboards. What was repeatedly stressed by Frontier ahead of release was the term ‘authenticity’. If you’re new to this genre of games and are playing on a console, then you’ll find navigating the menus to be more cumbersome than playing on PC with a mouse and keyboard. Or you can just jump straight in, pick one of the 10 teams to take over and go head first into the 2022 season. If you haven’t given the Motorsport Manager series a go though then you can choose to have a tutorial at the start of the game. There are more than just passing similarities between the two games and if you’ve ever played Motorsport Manager then you will be very familiar with the menu layouts and the micro-managing needed during race weekends in F1 Manager 2022.

That doesn’t mean it’s beyond critique though, especially as it is comparable to Playsport Games’ Motorsport Manager PC game which came out in 2016.

F1 manager game