F1 25 PS5 Review. The F1 gravy train of yearly releases continues ever on with F1 25. The past few entries in this venerable motor racing series have added in swarms of new social and engage-focused features that have kept players revving behind the steering wheel for hours and hours at a time. This year the Breaking Point story mode returns for a third outing, reverse tracks are in, and vehicle customization has been overhauled-but do all these new additions and improvements make F1 25 as promising as Piastri, or as poor as Perez’s performances from last year?
F1 25 Review (PS5) – Going Off Track?
Returning from the 2021 and 2023 Formula One games, the Breaking Point story has come around to give us a third portion of F1 story goodness. This time Konnersport is attempting to prove they’re more than a languishing mid-tier racing team, as they ascend further up for the field towards Drivers and Constructors Championship contention. New management and personal drama enters the Konnersport garage, threatening to derail the team and their ambitions.
Breaking Point 3 welcomes back the cast from previous Breaking Point stories including Devon and his dad Davidoff Butler, Casper Akkerman, drivers Aaron Jackson, and Devon’s sister Callie Mayer, and despite the ticking-along drama inviting in new intrigue, the voice acting, script and cutscenes are underwhelming. Major story beats don’t hit as hard as they should because the characters don’t convey authentic emotions, and they’re hard to believe and take seriously. The inter-family squabbles are interesting in the sense that you’ll ponder how everything will turn out for the best ultimately, but there’s a lot of silliness and incomprehensibility to wade through along the way.
The on-hands dealings of Breaking Point are a little more compelling than the cutscene-based storytelling. As the man in charge, you’ll be trying to satisfy the media and your team by contending with pressing decisions within the Konnersport garage. You’ll decide matters such as whether Aaron or Callie should attend a TV show so they have the opportunity to reveal their personal sides more, and who should attend sponsorship events. In addition, you’ll receive communications about risky sponsorship deals and you get to decide whether a developing driver should stay with the team or go and advance his career in another team.
Managing team decisions is a cool way to give you a sense of control, though the consequences of poor decision-making can’t be truly felt. Furthermore, the constant news, media, and e-mail feeds, as well as the nuisance phone calls from colleagues and family members can be too much information to take in, but you can skip all of it if you so choose.
On-track, you’ll be up against a myriad of scenarios as you attempt to bring glory to Konnersport. No two chapters in this story are quite the same, so you may find yourself needing to reach a certain position in one instance, and another you’ll be nursing a car with a stuttering gearbox. The variety might be pleasant, yet usually you’re racing normal laps on normal circuits and the action continues until you finish the race or a story cutscene pops up to pull you back into Breaking Point’s narrative flow. It’s therefore difficult to see the meaningfulness and worth of your contributions to the story through the gameplay, so you’ll likely be concentrating more on completing races than the drama of the story-as they tend to seem like two disparate parts rather than a cohesive whole.
On the whole, Breaking Point 3 coasts along in a similar manner to the previous installments, and while it is commendable for F1 to have a story mode, the writing and the voice acting are sub-par despite some of the tasty drama you’ll no doubt experience throughout.
Running On Fumes
Away from the Breaking Point story, one of the biggest new features of F1 25 is the inclusion of reverse circuits. Much like in Codemasters racing games such as GRID, a few of the tracks in F1 25 have been flipped such as Austria’s Red Bull Ring, Silverstone and Zandvoort. At first glance these reverse tracks don’t seem interesting at all, but the speed of a turned-around Austrian GP, and a raucous rollercoaster rotation of the Dutch GP have their surprising thrills you’ll have to play to behold.
The drawback is there are only a few of these reverse tracks, which is quite deflating and half-baked because they’re being pumped up as headlining features. The fact that naysayers and critics mock the apparent enormity of reversed tracks shows that maybe EA aren’t even trying anymore.
We aren’t playing new CodeMasters F1 games anymore, the ones with classic tracks and cars, we’re experiencing EA F1 games, the entries in the franchise that appear to care more about engagement rather than entertainment with their new social features and rudimentary gameplay objectives. This new reality for F1 games is frankly off-putting despite the appreciable hard work that is put into these games every single year.
Another new feature touted in this year’s game is the new laser-scanning technology that brings a bolstered sense of authenticity to several circuits. Melbourne, Bahrain, Suzuka, Miami and Imola are all improved with the new technology known as LIDAR-Light Detection And Ranging, giving a refined sense of elevation and feeling to these tracks like never before.
Much like the reversed tracks, the new laser treatment given to these five lucky circuits isn’t enough to truly qualify it as a proper headlining feature because there aren’t enough tracks given this feature. Yes, if one doesn’t know how much work goes into crafting these tracks, you wouldn’t understand-but at the same time headlining features are meant to be huge and permeate through the game, they shouldn’t just be signposted as an “oh, and this is in the game” kind of feature.
Under The Wing Improvements
F1 25 modes and options are generally similar to what we’ve seen before. Driver Career and Team Career options return, where you can either take an existing or customized driver through the stacked 24 race season while dealing with contract negotiations and achieving team-based targets. In Driver Career specifically, you’ll be invited to select objectives to complete for a range of specialists, which will help you to level up your rapport with the team and grant perks such as lower costs for upgrades and reductions of manufacturing times.
Much like all the objectives you need to satisfy in F1 World, Specialist goals keep you achieving and upgrading your performance in a way that keeps you focused, but do we really think that not receiving a penalty in a race will result in cheaper enhancements? Only in an EA Sports F1 game it seems. Even so, Specialists keep you challenged and focused on building your car’s performance, and that’s what you need in order to compete with the best.
My Team Career feels more fleshed out as not only are you creating, customizing and running through multiple seasons with your new team, you’re also creating your owner and are responsible for overseeing the progress of your team, and managing your own prowess to efficiently carry your team to championship-winning prominence.
Customization has evolved in F1 25 courtesy of the new decal editor. Primary patterns can now be stamped with sponsorships which can be manipulated, reshaped and resized as you see fit. Furthermore, the fictional sponsorships you see have special liveries that you can utilize as your own, which is quite slick if you fancy a more impressive and official look to your team’s livery. If this wasn’t enough, devotion to your chosen sponsors net you rewards like XP and new decals.
The new improvements to customization do a fair job of building on what has come before, giving a bit more flavour to maintaining sponsorship and improving the options as far as car fashion options are concerned. This may not be such a big deal if F1 team customization isn’t your thing, but for those who yearn for finely-honed car creation, then this year’s efforts are commendable.
Old Bodywork on a New Game
F1 World returns again for its third appearance. This year, Invitationals are a brand new component on the multiplayer front, encouraging players to work together and thrash the A.I by accruing as many points as possible during races. Teamwork and racing for the common good of whooping artificial intelligence’s behind is what defines Invitationals, but will you be up for the collaborative challenge? They certainly demonstrate that teamwork can make the dream work, and the rewards might be worth the effort if you know what to expect.
Elsewhere, F1 World is business as usual just like most aspects of F1 25. Sure, there’s only a year (or a little less with modern F1 games it seems) between F1 titles, but when the menus look similar to last year and the game’s soundtrack is as one-dimensional and tacky as this year’s game showcases, it’s not a good look. At least last year they managed to give us some Ian Livingstone goodness, but this year the music is forgettable, the menus don’t mean much outside of realistic-looking F1 models of Lewis Hamilton, Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri. The menus simply don’t look very attractive and should be renovated.
Though F1 25 looks and sounds as impressive as ever, there were times during the review process where flickering and stuttering were present whilst driving around Circuit of the Americas and Silverstone for example. In addition, there are times during races where the game stop-starts in a very fleeting moment of freezing that shows there are imperfections to be found on the technical side of F1 25.
So should you put your pennies into F1 25? The answer is admittedly difficult to discern. Breaking Point 3, the reverse tracks, laser scanned tracks and customization improvements are fine upgrades that deserve to be appreciated for the details and ways they enhance the F1 video game experience. However, there’s a continuing absence of something truly groundbreaking to give F1 fans something to seriously celebrate and rejoice.
Subtle improvements and the amalgamation of ways F1 25 engages players aren’t enough to stave off the fact there’s no bold step forward here. It’s another year and another entry, and while you’ll still want to return if you’ve been dedicated to F1 games for years, there’s not enough here to justify it as a must-buy.
F1 25 releases on May 30 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.
Review code was kindly provided by the publisher.