Wheely good fun
Grid Legendsalso has a Kudos system of sorts, rewarding you with XP for performing drifts, drafts and maintaining the ideal racing line. But while your XP rises, your bank balance fluctuates depending on your team’s performance, with costs deducted against winnings after each event. It’s by no means amanagementsim, at least not in the six events of story mode that were available for us to play. In fact, in my preview build there was no option to spend any of that hard-earned (or just ‘earned’ if you use the rewind option all the time) cash just yet. Instead, the focus was all about the story.
The story begins with a serious crash, before rewinding 16 months to give you the lead-up to that incident. You play the part of a driver who’s called in at the last minute – referred to simply as ‘Number 22’ - to stand in for a team-mate who quit just before the start of the season because… well, he was rubbish. Nobody’s expecting you to shine, but all eyes are on your team to see whether it’ll implode or prevail. So you’ll see the team principal, Marcus Ado, your engineer Ajeet Singh, and your star team-mate, Yume Tanaka, conversing with each other and giving interviews in the access-all-areas documentary about the team that’s being filmed. It works well and sets it up for a promising journey.
Rivalry is certainly the focus here, as backed up by the returning ‘Nemesis’ system. Use a rival’s car as a brake or barge through where there’s no room and their track map dot will turn red. It isn’t limited to one car, either, so if you’re a bit lunge-happy (which you’ll need to be in the short, five-minute races), you’ll soon have half the field out for your blood. They really do barge into you, too, sometimes preceded by a little wiggle so you know it’s coming. Sure, it’s channelling Wacky Races rather than real life in these moments, but it’s fun so it doesn’t matter too much.
The races are full of incidental events too, which keeps things interesting. Cars’ engines blow causing them billow smoke that obscures your view. Opponents spin, crash and even flip reasonably frequently. The tyre walls are also more evident in this outing, placed cannily on the exit of corners, so if you run too wide you get a pleasing explosion of physics objects. Steering can be bent and engines damaged as before, but as with the last game, it’s currently harder to damage your car than it was in the 2008 game, again making this more accessible. After all, it isn’t fun to cripple your car on the first corner and spend the rest of the race watching everyone else disappear into the distance.
While it’s too early to examine graphical performance in detail, it’s already a beautiful game. I had no issues running it at 1080p on an Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics card with everything on Ultra. Confetti fills the air at the startline, shadows filter through smoke, and the game already holds together well, even when hurtling along at breakneck speed.
The full game will feature online multiplayer with crossplay, allowing PC owners to go head-to-head with console gamers, although this is optional if you prefer to keep your races a strictly PC affair. We’ve also been promised over 250 career events, meaning the Driven To Glory story mode I’ve talked about here isn’t the only single-player mode you’ll be getting your teeth into come launch day, as well as 130 routes through old and new Grid locations, and over 100 cars.
Some previously-shunned game modes are returning as well, such as Drift and Elimination. Grid Legends will also allow you to mix disciplines at will in Race Creator, which is a very new idea, creating fantasy matchups between trucks and single-seaters, with an appropriate headstart for the slower rides, as well as the option to place boost gates to grant a turbo boost to drivers who deviate from the racing line and pass through them.
It’s all looking good for the game’s release on February 25th, though whether the game will finally completely recapturethe original’s sense of raw dynamism remains to be seen. The potential’s there, certainly, with a comprehensive damage system, mechanical frailties and fallible AI – it’s now just down to how Codemasters choose to balance it all for the final release. Fingers crossed it takes off the safety catches for a welcome change.
