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What makes a great arcade racer? Responsive controls? A varied selection of cars and tracks? Thrilling but approachable racing? How about a story mode with real actors playing rival racing drivers in a soap opera-style drama? No? Well, like it or not, that’s what Grid Legends delivers in its marquee mode, Driven to Glory.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: a racing game doesn’t really need a story mode, but Driven to Glory is surprisingly entertaining, even though it is cheesy and a tad predictable at times. The tale follows a racing team called Seneca and its charismatic and ambitious leader Marcus Ado, played by Miles Yekenni. Ado recruits you, the player, to be Seneca’s newest driver, tasked with winning the championship against tall odds. To do it, you’ll have to overtake the nefarious team Ravenwest and their star driver Nate McKane (Callum McGowan). Ravenwest are not above cheating to secure their crown, and although McKane doesn’t actually possess a moustache, if he did he would no doubt spend much of the story twirling it.
The story is brash, popcorn fare filmed in a documentary style. The fact that no-one involved takes any of it too seriously is to its credit. Natsumi Kuroda puts in a commendable performance as your Seneca teammate, while Ncuti Gatwa—recently cast as the new Dr Who—pops up as a preening driver from team Voltz.
The actors seemed to be having fun delivering their lines and chewing the scenery. I found myself looking forward to the next video while driving through the campaign. My only criticism is that the cast always refer to you, the player, as ‘Driver 22’, which felt strange and pulled me out of the story at times. I think they could have used a similar system to the one in the Forza Horizon series, where the player picks from a predefined list of nicknames which are then spoken in game by the NPC characters. But this is a very small gripe in the scheme of things.
Drama On And Off The Track
The sense of drama in Driven to Glory is reflected in the action on the tarmac. Fireworks explode out of every available location as you tear around tracks in cities like London, Paris, and Shanghai. The music sounds like it’s been ripped from the soundtrack to a Hollywood movie. AI drivers will frequently crash or spin out of control, filling the track with smoke and detached bumpers. If you bash into another driver too often, they’ll become your rival. In theory, this means they will then try to run you off the road in revenge, but to be honest the rivalry system didn’t have as much impact as I expected.
The racing itself is solid. Cars are generally easy to control and feel firmly rooted to the tarmac. There are a good number of cars available—though definitely less than in, for example, Forza Horizon 5—in different classes including GT, touring cars, trucks, and even electric cars (which, true to life, sound like a hive of irritable bees as they pull away away from the grid). On its default difficulty settings, Grid Legends definitely feels like a breezy arcade racer, but it is possible to tweak various settings if you prefer a more challenging experience. As well as increasing the skill of the AI drivers, you can reduce or remove the racing line indicator, make damage to your car more realistic, and remove or reduce the ability to rewind time to correct mistakes.
Career Mode
Once I’d finished Driven to Glory, I spent most of my time in career mode, which presents a straightforward series of races grouped by the different car types. Stripped of the story and, oddly, the music from Driven to Glory, career mode can feel a bit flat at times. What saves it is the drive to unlock new cars and race types through Grid Legends’ progression system, which runs through all of the game modes. You’ll earn experience points called ‘racecraft’ throughout each race by doing things like overtaking smoothly and following the racing line perfectly for an extended period. You then use these points to unlock new cars and upgrade existing ones. Upgrading specific cars is required to unlock certain career mode events. You can also enter into sponsorship contracts to earn more xp by fulfilling certain conditions, and there is also a simple skill tree to upgrade your driver and co-driver, although the skills didn’t feel especially impactful. There’s also a robust online mode where you can challenge other players and take part in curated events that rotate weekly and monthly.
Overall, Grid Legends is a fun and approachable racer that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It lacks the sheer breadth of content of some other arcade racers, but I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it so far and I’m looking forward to unlocking more cars and events in career mode. Driven to Glory is worth checking out for anyone who enjoys cheesy stories in video games, or who fondly remembers the time when full motion video sequences were common in games.