If you’re plugged into the racing game scene, you’ll have noticed that Gran Turismo 7 is nearly upon us. If you’re particularly aware, you might have spotted that it’s that series’ 25th anniversary year. What you perhaps haven’t spotted is that there’s another racing series that’s celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new release a mere week before.
Unlike Gran Turismo 7, which has clung to a successful formula and recognisable aesthetic for its full quarter century, Grid Legends is barely recognisable as a sequel to 1997’s TOCA Touring Car Championship, the game at the root of its lineage. And while describing this as a TOCA game is a bit like claiming that the latest Mercedes Formula One challenger is actually a silver Tyrrell, fire up a race in its Classic Touring Car class behind the wheel of a yellow and blue Renault Laguna and the spirit lives on.
Grid Legends reviewPublisher: EADeveloper: CodemastersPlatform: Played on Xbox Series XAvailability: Out now on PC, PS4/PS5 and Xbox One/Series S/X
It’d be a serious stretch to describe the EA Sportsified Grid Legends as the FIFA of motorsport games, not least because it gives officially licensed championships a wide berth, but the game takes a similarly maximalist approach to racing. Its healthy selection of cars is cannily distributed across a multitude of classes and disciplines, ensuring there’s almost always at least a couple of evenly matched but independently characterful vehicles to pit against each other. There’s significant duplication from 2019’s series reboot, but the few additions are at least wilder and more specialised than that game’s slightly more conservative platter.
Stadium Super Trucks pitch and lean into corners on blancmange-like suspension, requiring a unique cornering technique, while the new electric racers feature a Formula E style boost zone, offering a shove that’s closer to hyperspace than horsepower. It’s all underpinned by a handling model that is intuitive and authentic without being slavishly realistic. Each car handles exactly as you’d imagine it to in your idle racing driver fantasies rather than in accordance with anything as tedious as the laws of physics. It’s like instead of consulting an engineer, they consulted an 11-year-old.
GRID Legends | WORLD-FIRST Gameplay & More Revealed! Watch on YouTube
Clearly, despite the presence of real world racing machinery, this isn’t a simulation, but I happen to be quite fond of the Grid series’ dramatic, kinetic brand of arcade racing. Its pleasingly fallible AI are prone to accidentally throwing it off the circuit under pressure and the Nemesis system returns, ensuring there are consequences to using an AI driver as a cornering aid. And by consequences I mean finishing the race with a car that looks like it was rejected as a prop in Mad Max: Fury Road for looking too tatty.