What if someone made Motorsport Manager, but it has the full F1 license? That’s a simple enough idea to work. And so we have F1 Manager, a free-to-play Motorsport Manager-esque strategy game for mobile devices. This has no connection to the pretty successful series, mind. It’s by developers Hutch, which has experience in racing games and on mobile.
After spending the last two weeks playing, I can say that it’s a well-executed game. But its inherit free-to-play mobile game design is a turn-off that only a casual mobile gamer, or a hardcore enough F1 fan, can handle.
Simple, but not dumbed down
In F1 Manager, you take control of your own 11th entry to the F1 2019 teams in races from this year’s calendar. You get to call the shots on when to have your drivers push or conserve their pace, and when to pit with what tyres to put on. All from a distant perspective from the pretty well-rendered trackside.
If you’ve played Motorsport Manager this all seems familiar, albeit simplified further. There’s no tyre heat to manage, tyre compound is streamlined to three rather than the possibility of five in real F1 (no mediums and intermediates). No team orders button.
The simplification doesn’t feel like it’s dumbed down. Planning how your race strategy, how many times to pit, managing your drivers pace and reacting to changing conditions of the race like rain or a safety car is still vital. And nailing them down and making up positions up front is a satisfying reward still. It’s just enough elements to juggle within a general 5-minute race.
Did somebody say GACHA?!
Unfortunately, this is all secondary to the whole experience. This is a free-to-play game after all. And surprise surprise, it has gacha. You build your fantasy team from a pool of the 2019 F1 drivers with different stats and rarity. Having enough multiple copies and you can upgrade them. You’ll start off with the pair of Lance Stroll and Alex Albon, the lowest rated of the drivers as you work your way to better drivers. There are also various parts of the car, all fictional, that you need to unlock and upgrade through the power of opening loot crates.
Opening loot crates earned through winning races will require a wait worth of a few hours in real-time unless you pay with the premium currency. There is only room for four loot crates from race wins to queue up (but only one can have the timer ticking to be opened at a time), which functions as a soft play limit. You can play races as long as you have the coins to enter but why play more when you can’t gain more loot crates?
You can outright buy loot crates and they open instantaneously. For freebie players, there’s also the occasional free loot crate, which the game will constantly push notifications to remind you to open it as they are made available.
Currently, there is only one game mode in F1 Manager and that is Duel, You and another presumably real player join the 20-grid race. You pay in-game coins to enter, which is placed in a pot and whoever between the two scored the most points, wins. And takes home the pot.
It’s easy to enter into a snowball of good races where you keep on winning and earning tons of rewards. The opposite is also true. It’s frustrating when the matchmaking does a bad job when you have an opponent that clearly has the better car with no chance of winning. Even moreso that you can assume they might have just thrown money to get that good.
Ironically, F1 Manager replicates the real F1 experience which fans are agonising about right now- the big teams with the money keeps winning and dominating.
If you spiral downward enough to not have enough coins, the game will throw in some offers to buy with premium currency or real money to entice you to keep on playing. You’ll also get limited-time offers when you unlocked a new series of races and reward pool. While this might be from good intentions, it rubs me the wrong way. The game makes too much effort on enticing and coaxing you with deals to put out your wallet out.
Closing Thoughts
At the moment, F1 Manager remains an interesting and curious little time-waster. Its slick presentation, nice use of the F1 branding, pretty graphics and simple strategy gameplay is entertaining. But I don’t see a good reason to throw money at it other than if you want to get that elusive Lewis Hamilton jpg, or got tired of opening boxes of Lance Strolls. Maybe with an additional mode that isn’t about gambling against other players, then maybe this would be an easier recommend.
For now, F1 Manager is a mobile game for the F1 fans who wants to see on-track action and those wanting to prove they are better than whoever that is running the strategies at Ferrari right now.
F1 Manager is available now for iOS and Android devices.