An Honest Look At... Grid Legends

I take a look at Grid Legends, a game which i quite like and have enjoyed racing in, despite a somewhat large list of flaws...

[jsade]

I'm willing to bet that you left the default steering input settings, which indeed makes it near impossible to countersteer. Set the steering sensitivity from 50 to 100 and linearity from 4 to 5 and it feels as responsive as it should.

[placeholder]

Because of GT7, I didn't even hear about this game. In fact, I thought it was already out until I saw reviews popping up.

[vycanismelodis]

3:45 *alex goes off the track onto the grass*
commentator: "if you want to see a perfect corner... that was it!"

[theidealcopy_]

It's sad to see this is where the Grid series has ended up, considering just how good the original was. Also, given the fact that they've been paying streamers who normally don't play racing games to stream it, it definitely feels like they're aiming this at people who haven't played a racing game before, or just aren't usually interested in the genre. The janky physics, seasick camera bobbing & overall fairly hollow gameplay remind me of NFS 2015, and that's not a comparison anyone wants made to their new game.

[haydnskinner]

Hi there FailRace, my dad worked on the Panoz GTR-1 as a designer/ engineer. So glad to see it in a game!

[jamesphillips]

The first grid was fantastic and almost perfect in every way and they haven't been able to achieve that again

[monkyface]

grid legends problems summed up from my experiences playing the game and the dlc:

car list is amazing I love them, but some cars don't feel like they should or sound like they should

drifting physics is very odd and I usually play on legend but have to whack it down to medium to beat the drifting because the mechanics feel very odd

AI making mistakes is a nice touch, but they went too far with it and it gets frustrating when someone spins after a corner and you just ram into them

The AI are so bloody slow through the corners but massively faster than you in a straight line. I play on manual and it feels like every time I shift gear, the AI don't slow down. The difficulty ofc affects the AI speed, but on Legend it just feels like your car is massively underpowered in the straight and much faster in the corners.

The AI don't always seem to notice you're there, and because you often only make time through corners, sometimes they just run you off the track or smash you into walls. Most of the time it is amazing and you can have good battles with some other cars but it doesn't feel polished.

There is a weird sticking effect when you come into contact with AI. If you drive into the back of another car through a corner, I find that you can't pull away or turn, so you kind of get left going very slowly because the AI stops and you're stuck behind them.

The career mode doesn't feel like a career mode, it just feels like you're taking a bunch of different cars, racing them through different tracks on minorly different game modes, until you win and then move onto the next race. The story mode feels very slow and there is not much flesh on the story, occasionally you get a cutscene before a race that interviews someone, or at the end of the maingame story reveals that Ravenwest were cheating, but there doesn't feel like there is much story involved. The DLC stories are much shorter, only between 8 or 11 events whereas the main game is mid 30s.

The upgrade system is pathetically re-used, every single car has the same upgrades and it just boosts the stats minorly, and often I feel like I have to grind to get the mileage to buy the car's upgrades just so it feels playable.

You have the option to upgrade your team mate and mechanic, and these require a fair amount of money, and don't seem to add much. Your teammate is pathetic and useless and I find the teammate adds nothing to the gameplay. You cannot swap teammates out for others; it would have been a nice addition if different teammates added different bonuses or had different stats. In the story mode, you cannot use the push or hold buttons, so the teammate feels even more useless, and in the career mode the teammate can actually hinder your performance in an event and cause you to lose a championship unless you buttonmash the push button. There was lots of potential for the teammate and its functions, but codemasters failed massively at this.

The game doesn't feel like it is designed to be played with the assists off. I am very much a casual player, usually I stick to the standard difficulty and that is fine with me, but this game has me fluctuating between expert and legend based on how frustrated with the AI I am. Turning off the ABS and traction control and stability control do affect the car, which is nice, and if you want to be fast then the assists slow you down because you have reduced control over your car. For maximum control you need to play with no assists on manual, and I love that you have the option to do that. What I find weird is that this is an arcade game, and turning everything off makes you race like youre playing a sim. You need to have a decent understanding of real life circuit racing but the game is structured to be like an arcade.

Car customisation is lacking, I know this game is different to open worlds like nfs heat or forza horizon 5, but the maximum customisation you can get is changing the colour of a bunch of preset wraps, and some of them don't even fit the car. The same wraps can be applied to every car, and they have not adjusted the wraps to fit every car.

The Classic Car-Nage DLC has issues with it too. The dlc is based on demolition derby events, however the game doesn't have a fair damage physics. Your car feels much lighter than the others, and if you hit someone, you spin out often. I would have liked to see a more developed damage physics for the demolition derby events, because using the same ones as regular circuit racing makes completing the demolition derby events a struggle for me and it put me off doing that dlc.

Ultimately, a racing game needs to have good driving, and this game almost nails it. The car selection is amazing, there are lots of different classes and gamemodes, but it feels very unreactive and unpolished. If you start unintentionally oversteering, often there isn't much you can do about it and the AI drive into you so much it can be quite frustrating.

The online multiplayer lobbies in this game are chaos. I spent hours trying to find an online lobby where people are genuinely trying to race, rather than crash around and spin you and you can only win a race if you start in first and pull away from the pack. In iRacing, you have a safety rating so others can see how safe of a driver you are, and this game could have benefitted from it. Driving aggressively is not viable, you are much slower in being aggressive compared to clean racing, so having a safety rating would make finding online lobbies much much more predictable.

The sponsors add little to the game, and just feel like a small set of silly challenges to complete to unlock a career event. Some of the challenges are good, like near drafting or doing a certain amount of overtakes per race, but some of the challenges require you to do barrel rolls which is just silly. The game also encourages you to use the handbrake in GT cars to get around corners, which I also find silly.

In the end, this game is a good arcade racing game but it lacks a lot of fine tuning. It feels very rough around the edges, and lots of the dialogue is very narrow: for example if the objective of the race is to come 5th and you come 12th, you get the same dialogue as if you come 4th, or come 1st. There is no difference in how your position affects the gameplay, and with your team mate being so useless and mechanic not affecting much of the driving it honestly feels very rushed. I won't call this game a cashgrab because it features no ingame transactions aside from the DLCs, however if you didn't get this game in the may 2023 ps+ it does not feel worthy of being released at the same price as fh5. If a game is being released at the same time as gt7 and at the same price as fh5, then it needs to deliver as much if not more than the other two, and codemasters failed to deliver with this game. I advise not wasting your money on buying the game, and if you got it from the monthly games section of your console subscription, I advise you not to waste your money on the DLCs, they do not add much to the game, the new cars don't feel overpowered in any way, and the stories are very short and thrown together and do not compliment the main campaign at all.

I am in no way a professional reviewer, but this lengthy comment is just sharing the honest opinion and I know that many others will share the same opinion. Please do not take my comment solely as your entire opinion of the game, but thank you to anyone who read this :D

[Kinna]

I've got a question for the organisers of these races in Grid... Why do fireworks go off every time you drive under a bridge? And not just anybody drives under a bridge. Only you. Everytime one particular driver drives under a bridge there's someone setting off fireworks, but not for anyone else... 🤔

[GRMRACER]

I like the game for some weird reasons.
1) Its amazing on a wheel.
2) Online Career races
3) AI will drive correctly to competitiveness ( If they have the line they will not give a fuck. You have the line they will back off. If you insulted their mother they will take you out. And randomly the cars will blow a tire flip spin and its is funny as hell.)
4) Crossplay good
5) Electric cars are fun as hell.

Bad Parts
1) Some classes have little cars in them
2) Some cars in classes have unfair advantages (R32 Super Modified the only one with extra upgrades in-class)
3) Sloppy lobby system. ( If you are in a lobby you can't edit your cars untill race is selected and ready to load race. cant access team management to fix sponsors.)
4) Sponsors how the fuck do they work?
5) Liveries and Sponsor decals are crap. and with the progression its hard to figure out what livery you unlocked.
6) Upgrades are to basic I wish you can have drawbacks and ways to get the cars to have different characteristics to compete ( another supermodified example The RX7 is trash fight me, and the STI is useless. I know you are ment to have a car for the track situation but when every track gets dominated by the EVO because it has a 0-60 that makes The Flash cream its stupid.)
7) AI difficulty doesn't matter. The money you get doesn't change by difficulty.
8) The random events in racing. Sure watching the AI crash on their own is funny but then we had a whole party of friends in a race where all of us had blown a tire. Some of us never touched anyone. AI would spin and hide in Apex's and ruin a day. And the AI can not be pushed off the track they are some thicc bois that can not be moved.
9) Racing line and getting XP. That racing line not even close, and the thin margin to stay on it just to keep a combo up is lame.
10) You can't even upgrade the Drift Cars.

I give the game grade of [B-]. But we have been starved of a racing game for so long (horizon is not a racing game, it is a car culture game).
Ways I would fix it. If GRID, DIRT, and F1 Merged into one racing mega franchise. Have a way to have career racing development like F1 with the rally and circuit classes like the GT's and modified and have a way to keep up with every year/season racing the rules and regulations. Over the development of the cars you can improve the reliability of every aspect of the cars so that power can stay steady over a long race, no overheating, no dropping of gears, tire popping chances, less brake fade, and after watching my teammate just out of the blue infront of me just have the hood fly off prevent that sort of thing from happening and repairs are cheaper. BUT you can either do this too, develop the car to be faster, better engine development and even cheat. Or develop the car for handling. 3 options to go all in on or spread out the dev. Power, Handling, or Reliability. after a season it gets reset and you can bring any single tech over to the next season. For Multiplayer you can have a fixed amount of tech points to allocated to the car.

[stephenwilliams]

There's a lot of games that don't satisfy my driving physics needs this is not one of them I'm already loving the game

[flafik]

Every time new Grid comes out all I do is check is it like the first one with better graphics new cars/tracks and it never happens.

[wispyprkdmedia]

I plan on picking this game up for the awesome car list, especially the classic Euro touring cars! But a bit after GT7

[ciderandthorazine]

in the oldern days of GRID, the unpredictability of racing was shoe-horned into a story arc by _making Ravenwest unbeatable via removal of the laws of physics for them_ - until such time as you were actually meant to beat that team. depressingly, Forza Horizon 5 also does this, a decade later.

[channelcapablanca]

This game has one of the weirdest lift off feel. Too much engine braking almost

[Mike-zitf]

Multiplayer is a nightmare with all the rammers. Anyway excellent video thank you.

[Pennycilin]

About the car damage taking actual effort to start noticing something is wrong, I truly feel that. Playing the first grid and grid autosport, the game punishes me if I miss a braking point and ended up punting the back of an AI or hit a wall. But in this game, there are no consequences to hit the back of an AI or hit a wall with some speed.

[ctrlcf]

The rumble has caught me off so much with track limits. If I drive over a rumble strip, I want to feel the rumble strip. I don't really think I can find a fault with anything Alex said.

[StingrayMk]

Not a patch on Gran Turismo. Feels like Crash Team Racing by comparison. But it grows on you. Eventually it's arcade-feel virtues get their hooks in. It's like table tennis compared to tennis. Still fun, competitive, addictive, and something to enjoy. At first I thought I'd wasted my money on this game. I spent some time focusing on its faults. Now I am happy I bought it and I'm learning how to get the most from it. It's cross platform, guys! That's a bonus too.

[randomfaca]

GRID 2019 was one of the rare non Microsoft games that had the trigger vibrations working on PC, so I'm guessing this will get patched soon

[mquininfrnl]

Yeah I agree with the video, I like the gameplay and physics, it's just that there's not enough damage like the past Grids had, (you can crash into opponents and have no consequences).
And also the Team management is pointless, only good thing is that you get discounts when upgrading or purchasing cars.

Still I think is a good game, I've been playing it for some months now and having fun.