When I saw this I was hoping for something in the same vein as Grand Prix Legends or GT Legends. That trailer made this look like…any other average racing game.
I just realized that this game is coming out the same day as Elden Ring. Gah! That’s poor planning!
Do you think From/Bandai will realise and move the launch date?
If you have Gamepass (or EA Play, (haha)) you can now download this for a 10 hour trial before release.
When I search for it on the Game Pass app on my phone, I only see Grid Legends on PC, I don’t see one for console yet. At least, not using search. So maybe I can’t remote-install it while I’m at work. I don’t have EA Desktop installed on my PC because it was such a mess when it launched I uninstalled it.
I don’t own any consoles, so I’m only talking about PC options. I don’t know if it’s available for other platforms yet.
I think the best thing I can say about this is that I don’t hate it so far. I’m not sure it has much place in a world with Project Cars 3 and even Forza Horizon 5. But it’s got a compelling progression system, a decent enough driving model (although perhaps more arcadey than I usually like, with all the assists turned off and using manual transmission?), and nicely cinematic visuals (although I’m playing strictly from the cockpit view).
The story stuff is absurd, but easily skippable. In fact, it looks like nothing more than a series of optional races/missions with cutscenes sandwiched between them. You can ignore the story and just play a career. Or vice versa.
-Tom
I couldn’t see much of anything from the cockpit in the first car they put me in, so I switched to… I don’t know what to call it, maybe dashboard cam? The one where you can see the front of your car in front of you, but you don’t have all the glass enclosure of the actual cockpit blocking your view. I had no idea those fast formula one racing cars had such a restricted view in the cockpit.
I think that’s usually called a hood camera. And, yes, visibility can be a real challenge in some of these cars! Especially if you’re relying on the drive assist line, which is clearly built for people driving from the external view (implementation of the drive assist line is one of many things Project Cars 3 got right and everyone else still gets wrong).
But one of the reasons I like the cockpit view – I’m not using the drive assist line, so I don’t mind the visibility issues so much – is that part of a car’s personality is its dashboard. When you reduce every car’s dashboard to whatever HUD elements are provided for the external view (i.e. the speedometer/tachometer in the lower right corner), you rob cars of their personality just as you do when you play with drive assists enabled. Part of what I enjoy in games like these is the expression of different cars’ personalities, and Grid Legends is clearly one of those games that has fewer cars, but more care taken to distinguish them (contrast this to the steady stream of often poorly distinguished cars in Forza Horizon).
-Tom
I’ve loved cockpit views since the first game that got me into driving games: Need For Speed High Stakes (aka NFS 4 or 5, I forget which), from 1999 or 2000. Cockpit view just helps with immersion and atmosphere and feeling like I’m in the car and actually racing.
But I do draw the line at not being able to see the road properly. That’s why in the Forza games I usually switch to the hood cam for a lot of super cars. Many of them have incredibly restrictive views. But I switch back to cockpit cam for most other cars.
I only play the DiRT Rally games from the cockpit view. There are a couple of cars in that game with a very restrictive view, and for that I switch to the camera they have in the DiRT Rally games that’s right behind the steering wheel but you can still see the inside of the car behind the steering wheel.
Well, this is coming off the hard drive after about twenty races. While I appreciate the way some of the bits and pieces are put together to give context and progression to the races and cars, there’s one element I just can’t abide:
The physics are awful.
Just awful. Like kart racing awful (at one point during a race, your engineer suggests using the power brake to slide around a tight turn). The cars are too easy to control even with the assists all switched off, which means they don’t have the personality I’m looking for in a caRPG or racing game, and furthermore means I’m accidentally winning races even as I’m bumping up the AI to find a happy medium. It’s all too dumbed down to feel like a simulation, and not enough gameplay meat to sustain an arcadey driving game.
-Tom
This is a pretty fun arcade racer.
Can someone else confirm if they have heavy chromatic aberration FX in this game where it fuzzes a lot of the image quality?
Yes. I think that’s the artistic effect they were going for.