F1 2021 Video Game Review (About In Description)
0A pole new world.
The world of F1 was set to be transformed this year, thanks to the prospect of radical new regulations and cars. However, like so many things during the pandemic, the changes were delayed until 2022 – leaving F1 in a 12-month holding pattern. The real-life 2021 season seemed poised to offer few surprises, but the reality is that this season has so far been the most interesting championship in years.
Funnily enough, it’s this backdrop that Codemasters has found itself competing against with its own fictional drama, introducing a fully-fledged story mode to F1 2021 for the first time in the series. The end result falls a little short of being as dramatic as the real thing, but it’s a well-executed and welcome new way to play that joins the series’ wide array of existing modes and makes for another excellent package – albeit one that needs a bit of extra content to bring it in line with the real-life 2021 season.
Codemasters flirted with the concept of a story mode two years ago in F1 2019 with its brief, F2-themed intro and its curated set of late-race scenarios and first-person cutscenes. There, however, it was simply a short sequence of events bolted onto the beginning of the standard career experience. In F1 2021 the story is a standalone mode akin to The Journey from FIFA 17 to 19, or Fight Night Champion’s titular Champion Mode – although it’s never quite as sentimental as the former or as rousing as the latter.
Get to the Point
Dubbed Braking Point, F1 2021’s story focuses on a pair of very different drivers: rookie Aiden Jackson, a talented Brit who still has some key things to learn about the F1 paddock, and Casper Akkerman, a Dutch journeyman with an illustrious career that’s mostly behind him. Depending on your choice, Jackson and Akkerman will race for one of five selectable teams – Williams, Haas, Alfa Romeo, Alpha Tauri, and Racing Point (which becomes Aston Martin during the story). These fictional drivers will unseat the real-life drivers in your choice of team, but the rest of the grid will be made up of actual F1 stars from the 2020 and 2021 seasons – except for one. Another driver from one of the four remaining selectable teams will be replaced with Codemasters’ resident F1 reptile, Devon Butler, who returns from his brief appearance as the antagonist at the beginning of F1 2019 for a slightly bigger role this time around.
Beginning in F2 in 2019, Braking Point sees Jackson graduate to F1 for 2020, where he immediately clashes with old dog Akkerman after a careless on-track incident. The discord between the two is only exacerbated by Akkerman’s general saltiness at what he perceives as preferential treatment for Jackson, much to the chagrin of likable team liaison Brian Doyle (and much to the delight of the devious Devon Butler).
The races in Braking Point vary from lights to flag events to mid-race situations, each with different challenges to achieve. You may be salvaging positions after some earlier misfortune, catching a certain car within a specific number of laps, or finishing ahead of a nominated team. All of these racing scenarios are weaved into the needs of the story itself, which plays out via both cutscenes and a series of phone calls.
The cutscenes are well done, particularly considering they’re really unlike anything Codemasters’ F1 team have attempted before, and there’s a decent authenticity to the performances overall.
The cutscenes are well done, particularly considering they’re really unlike anything Codemasters’ F1 team have attempted before, and there’s a decent authenticity to the performances overall. It’s also cute seeing real F1 superstars popping up on the periphery of Jackson and Akkerman’s story.
Braking Point does take quite a while to build to any real crescendo, though, and once it does it wraps up rather rapidly. I was particularly surprised that I ultimately knew very little about Jackson by the end. If this is the launchpad for further stories tracking Jackson’s journey, and it definitely feels like it is, it’d be nice to know more about his backstory.
The obvious need to keep Braking Point all-ages appropriate also makes it feel a little blunted, especially when compared to Netflix’s infamously candid F1 docuseries Drive to Survive. For instance, there’s certainly nothing here as fiery as Grosjean’s heartstopping Bahrain crash, or as metaphorically fiery as Guenther Steiner’s door getting ‘fok smashed’.
Braking Point also ignores the COVID-19 crisis that had a huge impact on the 2020 and 2021 F1 seasons and includes races which never happened – which is a little incongruous if you dwell on it – but I did quite enjoy how it temporarily turns back the clock to revisit 2020’s car and driver combinations. Watching Ricciardo change from Renault to McLaren and Renault change from… Renault to Alpine reminded me a little of the multi-season nature of the fan favourite F1 Challenge '99-'02