How the F1 22 video game tries to encompass the championship’s lifestyle

With the Formula 1 season now in full swing, it’s around this time of year that the latest associated video game reveal becomes a highly anticipated inevitability. 2022 is no exception.

Having been hands-on with the work in progress PC-build version of the now entitled EA SPORTS F1 22 we can safely say this: It’s another Formula 1 game that is fun to drive, rewarding and, perhaps at this stage, a little all-too-familiar. 

To be clear, we were able to drive all current 2022 cars within Grand Prix and Time Trial modes. The tracks on offer included the all-new Miami International Autodrome, plus Imola, Silverstone, Circuit of the Americas and the Red Bull Ring.

Here are the most significant changes to the F1 gaming series this year, and an update on their development progress so far.

The sprint format

Sprints were a glaring omission from the F1 2021 game last season, not appearing even as a post-release update.

That’s changed, thankfully, for F1 22 and they arrive as part of three new weekend structure options: standard, authentic and ‘sprint and race’. 

Selecting the first simply means a straightforward three days of practice, qualifying and race. Authentic adds the sprint format to the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, Austrian Grand Prix and Brazilian Grand Prix as in the existing real-world calendar and the latter adds the sprints to every race in the season.

The number of laps within a sprint is determined by how long you set the main race to be. For example, choosing a short race will only require five laps in a sprint.

 

Goodbye Jeff

Since Adam Rhys Dee voiced your race engineer – first in F1 2010 and then as the perfunctory Jeff in F1 2015 onwards – we’ve all been screaming at him to leave us alone because we know what to do. 

With F1 22 however, the original voice artist has been replaced by Marc “Elvis” Priestley, an ex-Formula 1 mechanic who worked with McLaren from 1999 to 2009 and wrote The Mechanic.

The delivered lines…