Grid Legends (PC) Review

The most notable addition is the story mode, dubbed 'Driven to Glory,' acting as a fair introduction to the game's racetracks and its crop of cars. Players are put through a variety of scenarios with different objectives for each mission while sampling vehicles when progressing. The story itself is a novel idea but performed rather awkwardly. The narrative covers different racers and their journeys through a series of live action videos shot against practical and mostly digital backgrounds. While the composition achieved is admirable, the documentary style of storytelling came across as stiff and very artificial. Driven to Glory's narrative ends up feeling fake and shallow as it tries to tell a story around the trials and drama of racers from different disciplines.

Thankfully, the uniqueness of the story mode's missions carries over into a Race Creator mode allowing for some neat custom racing. Here one can save and customize any number of choices aside from the typical car discipline, location, and route. The suite of options includes edits like weather, the number of drivers and laps, as well as the inclusion of extra ramps and boosts. This shows off what this can be pushed to do in terms of performance and the engine's versatility. It's worth a note that the AI is rather poor, making offline racing less exciting. Rival drivers will often make obvious mistakes or just appear parked on the side of the track. The Nemesis System attempts to make opponents in Driven to Glory and other races more dynamic. However, you'll never really get the impression of the opponents getting more aggressive or challenging when branded a Nemesis.

Handling is solid and each class of car model feels distinct enough when controlling them. Controls using an Xbox Series gamepad were solid and responsive for each vehicle. The driving line also helped with navigate tracks with an added bit of visual clarity. When viewing vehicles in the Garage menu though, a stat sheet is given to differentiate each car from another, but it was hard to tell too many things that separated one touring car from the other in terms of control.

Progression leaves something to be desired. Power, Acceleration, Braking, Handling and Extra have one to three stages each, and driving distance in offline and online races is what's used to unlock each stage. This feels fairly barebones and basic compared to the Grid series' contemporaries. More in-depth customization would have helped make each car more unique and personalized, but this approach doesn't deliver. Cars are also very hard to acquire, making the process of unlocking vehicles for multiple classes rather arduous.

Performance largely gets the green light. With a relatively fair midrange PC, this critic put the game through its paces and was able to achieve above 60fps at 1440p without much of an issue using the Medium preset of settings. This still looks crisp and clean in motion and hitches were barely noticeable; which is some of the best praise to ask for when grading PC ports. Presentation in races gets the job done. Locations look very good, and the vehicles are modelled very well for the most part with solid texture-work.