![]() I'm coming first in all my races! "Seneca is failing." Shut the fuck up, I am awesome, Team Seneca would be screwed without me. Did you not see me winning every single race? "Team Seneca is in danger of falling out of the leaderboards". Most annoying of all, the scripted story is completely static, and fails to reflect, highlight, or even directly reference your driving or race performance. And thanks to the less than stellar writing, by the end of the story I didn't care who these aggressively one-dimensional people were, or the shallow motivations behind their actions. ![]() The hyperbolic, factitious 'drama' between the superficial characters certainly doesn't help. Unlike Netflix's excellent production, Grid Legends' documentary fails to engage the viewer in any meaningful way, mostly due to the ersatz racing teams and their entirely unknown owners and drivers. ![]() Netflix's Drive to Survive series is quite obviously the primary inspiration for the story mode in Grid Legends, and has been lovingly cloned with a mix of driver and crew interviews, and fly-on-the-wall 'candid' exposition scenes spread across 36 episodes chapters. Not every track is a winner of course, but there's sufficient variety to keep you coming back, if only to definitively conquer the mountain at Bathurst's Mount Panorama. After reaching a certain point in the story the tracks really open up and become immensely more enjoyable, with vast sweeping turns, technical chicanes, and even some challenging mountainside switchbacks. This wasn't obvious at first, as most of the initial racing season was spent on small, tight and generally unmemorable urban tracks. Grid Legends contains a great selection of tracks. Oh, and extra bonuses like increased currency. Outside of a race, vehicle upgrades (unlocked and purchased by driving said vehicle) can boost power, acceleration, braking, and handling. In the garage, and prior to a race, you're able to adjust the suspension, brake bias, and the gearing, via some sliders. Grid Legends presents a tuning system that's been drastically simplified. Opening a vehicle's tuning screen in, say, Forza (Motorsport or Horizon) for the first time, you might feel somewhat overwhelmed by the technicality and sheer quantity of adjustable aspects of your vehicle. The AI drivers have been tuned to defend their racing lines quite aggressively, and will jostle, nudge, and outright slam into you to do so. This isn't entirely surprising, given the amount of leeway (and subsequent lack of punishment) given when entering a corner hard under brakes, or applying full throttle at the apex of said corner. As such, the majority of vehicles lack the ability to transfer weight prior to cornering. Owing to the aforementioned lack of physics, a large number of vehicles feel rather 'floaty' and without any real sense of weight or presence on the track, aside from the exceedingly bouncy and strangely-annoying-yet-fun-to-drive stadium trucks. So much so I found myself placing bets as to who might wipe out, and how. These incidents occur entirely too frequently to be believable, but it works, in an amusing way. Perhaps to balance out the strong AI, in almost every race event one or more opponents will suddenly lose control and spin out, hit a barricade, or even lose a tire. Contact or overly aggressive driving on your behalf results in the AI ramping up their efforts to impede your progress, and will persist into future events long past the one race where the transgression occurs. Especially if you have earned their undying hatred by becoming their nemesis. All too often this means that advancing to the head of the pack will be accomplished by the end of the first or second lap (depending on the AI difficulty) leaving you to race the last few laps in peace, with the AI happily rubber-banding along behind you. While it is possible to lose control of the back end coming out of a turn, you really have to try to make it happen. The game goes out of its way to ensure a smooth, easy race, even with all the driver assists switched off. Grid Legends is an accessible, multi-discipline, arcade racer with the briefest of nods toward realism in terms of physics and car handling.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |