GRID Legends Review friv game - Drama Queen

The new online game from the developer Friv2Online in the GRID series tries to hook the gamer with a serious plot and a wide variety of racing activities. How she succeeds - read in our review.

Let's start with the plot. Live-action videos are a strong move. Designed in the form of interviews and broadcasts, they fit perfectly into the setting of racing competitions, allowing you to look at different points of view and listen to all sides of the conflict. Codemasters did something similar recently with F1 2021, with the only difference being that the game's cutscenes were pre-rendered, while GRID Legends boasts live actors - including Sex Education star Shuti Gatwa.

The events unfold around the Seneca Racing racing team, which is joined by an ambitious newcomer, the player's alter ego. The racer arranges a series of victories, which is not particularly happy with both rivals and ambitious partners. The difficult relationships between the characters are revealed in cut scenes, and the decision to use this format of shooting unexpectedly works during the races: you remember your opponents and begin to take them seriously.

The story campaign does not take much time, flies by in one breath. Within its framework, there is no choice of cars and tracks, and tasks do not always imply victory - sometimes you need to provide superiority to your partner or come in the top three.

Here, for the first time, you pay attention to the “personal enemy” system: if you push and interfere with other racers, they will aggro on our character, begin to cut and force him off the track. They are hardly capable of depriving a player of victory, but sometimes they make them nervous. At the same time, AI rivals themselves are not averse to arranging an aggressive ride. And they often make mistakes and get into accidents; it's nice to see that the opponent is not racing along the ideal trajectory, but can drop out of the race through his own fault.

In addition to the campaign, GRID Legends has a solo career mode. There are fewer nuances here than in the story mode, and promotion to the championship title is carried out according to a list of various events with a mandatory upgrade of cars. A career has its own charm, but many trials bored me because of their length. The GRID series has always been about circuit racing, and in Legends races of five or more laps are par for the course.

As for the multiplayer, we talked about it in a detailed preview. On release, the multiplayer friv game remained the same, and it is interesting to compete with live players, especially considering that in this case we lose the time rewind mechanics.

The game remains committed to the “simkada” genre – you don’t need to be a motorsport guru to win races, but you can enter a turn “on the side”, without any consequences for the car. The average level of difficulty turned out to be malleable enough to allow me to break away from my rivals for tens of seconds, and the inclusion of car damage had almost no effect on the gameplay: in order for the car to start to “steer” to the side, I deliberately had to hit obstacles with the wing seriously several times.

In combination with long races, this causes boredom: seeing that I was waiting for several laps of racing in which I would not meet a serious challenge, I wanted to turn off the game and look for something else. Or at least switch to more interesting modes, like a knockout race, where participants try to beat opponents before the timer expires, or mixed races, in which cars of different classes participate, or electric car competitions, which have their own characteristics, such as recharging on the track and then acceleration.

Every modern racing game has the ability to customize the difficulty and behavior of cars, and GRID Legends is no exception. If you wish, you can “play around” with various options, which will affect the handling of the car, or leave everything by default if you don’t want to understand the intricacies of tuning.

There are a lot of car models, and some, like electric cars, are still rare guests in video games; they are very responsive and stable, allowing you to drive at full speed even when entering corners. I liked the races in which monoposts (cars with open wheels) participate: here the requirements for skill and careful control are higher than anywhere else. Especially when maneuvering on narrow roads, where you can hit the side and lose control.

Although during the races it is rarely possible to pay attention to the scenery, in GRID Legends they were a success. Moscow meets the player with a track along the Kremlin wall, and in Paris, the Eiffel Tower rises in the background. The geography of races allows you to see the whole world, and each region has its own climatic conditions: for example, in Moscow you will be able to test yourself on a snowy road, and in Dubai, you can choose only sunny and rainy weather.

The game looks great in all conditions, the weather effects and lighting worked out especially well, although photorealism, especially in terms of reflections, is not worth looking for. The soundtrack, on the contrary, let us down a lot: the races are accompanied by insipid and forgettable compositions that you want to change to something else, more in line with the dynamism and intensity of the races.

Should you buy GRID Legends? If you love simcads, then yes: you will find a good story campaign, a reliable driving model, the ability to flexibly customize the car, a large selection of cars and tracks in a variety of weather conditions. The abundance of racing circuits can be tiring, and the music lulls you rather than sets you up to win, but the novelty does a good job of entertaining the player and strikes a balance between relatively realistic controls and the desire to hustle with rivals.