Grid Legends Review
The venerable Gran Turismo 7 is not the only racing game being released in the next week or so that can trace its roots way back to 1997; indeed, the first seeds of Grid Legends sprouted that same year with retro racing royalty TOCA Touring Cars on PC and the original PlayStation. Mining that 25-year history for inspiration and reenlisting some long-forgotten characters, Codemasters has turned Grid Legends into a sequel to both 2019’s Grid and 2002’s TOCA Race Driver, which was the first time the studio had injected a story into the series. The live-action, documentary-style approach of Grid Legends is very different from the primitive PS2 cutscenes of the pioneering TOCA Race Driver, but it’s a story I’ve enjoyed watching unfold – even if the on-track action hasn’t changed dramatically from Grid 2019.
Grid Legends’ story mode, Driven to Glory, is a little different from the one Codemasters debuted in F1 2021 last year; in Grid Legends the story is presented as a sports documentary rather than a standard drama. The ebb and flow of the fictional, globetrotting, multi-discipline Grid championship is contextualised via one-on-one interviews with the characters, plus other fly-on-the-wall moments as the camera crew slips into garages, VIP areas, and hovers around the paddock. It’s more Netflix’s Drive to Survive and less Sylvester Stallone’s Driven, and it’s probably the better of the two paths.
The live-action presentation has been pieced together using a mixed-reality process that places real actors on entirely digital backdrops, similar to the much-discussed technique employed to shoot The Mandalorian, and has actually worked quite well. It’s certainly an old-school solution – and reminiscent of the so-called cutting edge
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