Review: Grid Legends fails to rise above Codemasters’ other racing gems

videogameschronicle.com:

In a sense, Grid Legends is a victim of Codemasters’ own success.

The studio has been consistently delivering a steady stream of high quality racing titles for decades now, and while for any other developer something like Legends would be considered an accomplishment, here it feels a little by the numbers.

Certainly, compared to the two brilliant racing titles Codemasters has already released this generation – Dirt 5 and F1 2021 – Grid Legends feels somewhat more underwhelming, even though it doesn’t do anything particularly awful.

The game’s main selling point is its Story mode, which offers a series of set chapters interspersed with live-action cutscenes.

The player takes control of Driver 22, a young rookie racer who signs up for Seneca, a small racing team with ambitions of taking on the best.

The story is your typical ‘little guy comes good’ yarn that you’ll have seen a million times before, and the twist that happens halfway through is similarly textbook.

Much has been made by EA and Codemasters about the fact that the game’s cutscenes use the same ‘virtual studio’ technology as The Mandalorian, but in reality the two productions are about as similar as Jackass and Dune.

What it essentially means is that the cutscenes were shot in front of a large video wall, rather than a greenscreen, which in the case of The Mandalorian gave the cast a greater sense of presence as they actually got to see their surroundings.

Here, though, the same technique just results in a lot of ineffective scenes where the actors stand in front of very soft-focused CG racing environments.

It’s not that it looks fake, it’s just such a superfluous effect and the fact the backgrounds are always out of focus anyway makes us wonder what it accomplishes