brakes

Warning: Spoilers for F1 25’s Braking Point 3 mode lie head

I’ve turned the volume on my monitor down a bit.

The Tories – read as: members of a family with generational wealth, if you’re not from the UK – are shouting at each other again. Devon Butler’s dad – a man so Tory his name’s just a mishmash of two cigarette brands – just died and left him a multinational corporation. He’s p**sed off because it turns out the old man left its finances in a state that might necessitate the closure of the racing team he likes running.

Meanwhile, Devon’s sister Callie Mayer’s also understandably miffed that Davidoff Butler has kicked the bucket, mainly because it’s meant that Devon’s nicked all of his clothes and mannerisms. Oh, and because it might jeopardise her chances of driving a competitive F1 car bankrolled by her family.

There are other people working at the team these two are big parts of, but they just kind of exist in orbit of the big Butler family strife black hole. That’s not to say F1 25’s third instalment of the Braking Point mode that offers a narrative-heavy twist on the usual jump in a car and race formula, a lot like FIFA’s The Journey, doesn’t have some good stuff to offer.

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As I worked my way through its 15 chapters on the new hard difficulty setting (which proved a pretty perfect match for my skill level), the individual cutscenes and in-race scenarios that make it up were often good fun in isolation. While you won’t get much out of Braking Point if you’re not interested in Drive To Survive-esque drama with fictional team, if you’re open to an extended intro the game that gives you a chance to get up to speed with the latest entry, it suits that role. It’s certainly the first place I headed when I jumped into F1 25 this past weekend.

Modes like this have never been much more than a novelty to me, but I was keen to see where Codemasters would take Mayer’s story in particular. F1 23’s second edition of Braking Point had brought her into the picture as a landmark first female F2 champion (a thing that’s yet to be achieved in real life), and with her now firmly entrenched in an F1 seat there was plenty of room to take her tale in interesting directions.

Braking Point 3 certainly makes Callie one of its two main focuses, but only in the context of the big family drama I mentioned at the start. This year’s tale begins with Davidoff taking ownership of the Konnersport team through his company Butler Global, which is a fine setup. Both his son and fairly estranged daughter are at the team in daily big roles – Callie in the car and Devon on the management side – so plenty of chance for intrigue to simmer and play out.

Imagine your dad owning the F1 team you race for. Oh, hi Lance Stroll. | Image credit: EA/VG247

Well, that tension builds for about five minutes. Then boom, by about the third race you take part in and having been a fairly irredeemable dick to everyone thus far, Davidoff suddenly pops his clogs. Devon’s immediately installed as his replacement, both in terms of being the team owner and being the bloke that’s just really nasty to everyone. Cue lots of shouting matches between him, Callie, and team principal Casper Akkerman.

All of the cutscenes in which this plays out are well-acted and decently-written, but that’s the thing with Braking Point. In the micro, all the narrative bits are fine, but the macro storytelling really struggles to hit home. You could argue a lot of that’s down to the limitations of the format, with the mode only seeing the action happen during certain race weekends spaced out throughout the year, leaving gaps it jumps through in which you don’t get to see how the races or story are playing out.

In practice, it means that you’re jumping from one big narrative flashpoint to the next without any time to get acclimated to how the team as it’s made up as a certain time is working. The cast around the Butler kids is rotated into different positions in an attempt to make the fallout of Davidoff’s demise feel fluid, but from second driver Aiden Jackson, to Akkerman, and his temporary replacement Andreo Konner (who makes way for Devon himself to become team principal by the end), they’re all just puppets being synthetically shuffled about to suit the story.

See, I told you big Devon nicked his dad’s threads. | Image credit: EA/VG247

Akkerman aside, they lack much of a unique voice of their own, and so just exist around all of the Butler drama like that dog surrounded by fire that reckons ‘this is fine’. At the same time, the narrative hinges on how Konnersport is doing on-track in the drivers and constructors championships, but you don’t get to see how the points situation evolves. The result is a lot of tell rather than show that doesn’t feel like it meshes with how the natural drama of a real F1 season plays out.

You’ve got no data benchmark for how the teams are stacking up at specific point in a season, so therefore the mode has to tell you that Konnersport’s had a poor string of results or that Ferrari are on the surge, making situations feel a lot more manufactured. Rather than illustrating Braking Point’s on-track narratives via the same means the natural drama real F1 seasons organically generate, you’re quickly served synopses in loading screens.

This is alleviated a little bit by phone calls between characters in the menus between races, which offer a bit more time for in-depth character development and a chance to humanise these fictional humans. Braking Point 3 does also touch on and do a bit of exploration of some interesting themes, like how different people might react to losing a relative. However, it generally feels like in trying to be more like a movie or TV show in the way it tells its tale, it fails to take advantage of the inherent strengths that come with telling your story in a video game, specifically.

There is some driving, and it’s pretty fun. | Image credit: EA/VG247

By the time I was done, even though I’d made some choices with minor consequences, I felt like I’d watched a story involving some F1 unfold – I hadn’t become immersed in it, I didn’t feel like I’d stepped into the shoes of an F1 driver. Fittingly for a tale that doesn’t feature the real-world F1 teams you’re racing against in any capacity other than as silent on-track competitors to Konnersport, Braking Point 3 feels like briefly stepping into a bubble of drama largely separate from the F1 paddock. It’s a self-contained fictional universe totally separate from even the fictional reality these games deliver with their painstakingly accurate-looking simulated iteration of a real sport.

In neglecting to embrace being a story in a game, it achieves a level of artificial atmosphere Drive To Survive could only dream of, despite existing in a medium that thrives on connecting us to its version of reality in the most tactile fashion you can get outside of doing the real thing.

It fulfils its role of being a brief distraction, but I think there was potential here to do something a lot more substantive that’d have done more to help F1 25 achieve its goal of putting you in the racing boots of a real racing driver or team principal.

F1 25 releases on May 30 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with the Iconic edition offering early access from May 27. These impressions were written using a PS5 code provided by the publisher.

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