Formula Legends

[Naples39]

This game comes out tomorrow (on basically everything), and it looks really cool to me. Seems a great blend of accessible, pick-and-play gameplay, but grounded in reality and history with solid (but simplified) fundamentals of F1 racing. I haven't tried the demos, but they were generally well-received and it seemed that they responded to user feedback from them.

Here's a fair and overall positive review from a usually hardcore sim racer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3jQqk2 ... YXN1YWw%3D

Anyway I just thought it seemed like the kind of game people here would appreciate. I really hope the game succeeds too, because I would love to see this philosophy of pickup-and-play with solid, simplified fundamentals and history applied to other sport games as well.

[dbdynsty25]

Definitely looking forward to this one. There is a demo on the Switch…seems like it would be a cool handheld racer so gonna try it on the Switch 2 first. It’s only $20 anyway so whatever lol.

[dbdynsty25]

First impressions are that the Xbox x/s version is at a higher resolution than the switch (no surprise) but it also runs like s***. A stutters mess on the Xbox and the Switch 2 running the game is lower resolution but it’s smoother. Weird.

[GB_Simo]

I really want to like Formula Legends.

It's a little jaunt through F1 history, without an official licence but with all of the little nods you need to know what you're playing. You're not officially at Spa but that looked an awful lot like Eau Rouge, and there's no Jacky Ickx following you through the corner but there definitely is a Jake Eggs, that kind of thing.

Take that all the way from the late 1960s to the present day and in theory, you've got an absolute winner for the kind of bloke who'd import an NTSC XBox 360 just to play Indianapolis 500 Evolution. (I'd had a drink, granted. Then several more.) There should be hours of gameplay in this for me just to see which drivers and liveries I unlock next.

It does this weird juddering thing, though. Tag a wall on the Series X and you get multiple, slightly offset versions of the same frame displayed on screen, all of them kind of vibrating for a second or two until it clears up. You'll occasionally get stuck on/in the wall for a moment or two, which prolongs the experience just long enough that your eyes cross. It's not a visual effect as far as I can tell, unless there's a "hold 10 pages of a flip book open at once while being gently electrocuted" filter in the Options menu, there's no footage of it happening on other systems that I've found, and it gives me a headache.

Don't tag walls, then. Except I couldn't help but tag walls. The handling has come in for some criticism in reviews and I see why - it's not immediately intuitive, controlling your steering angle through a corner isn't easy and if you get the timing of your turn-in slightly wrong, there's not a huge amount you can do to correct it - but with a bit of practice you can certainly get your head around it. You'll hit things first, though, and the decision to have Monaco as the second track you race in Story Mode won't do a lot to help you with that.

There's a patch coming to introduce a new handling option, it seems, which might help those who didn't have their purchase refunded.

I did, though, so I'm no longer dealing with the AI drivers, all of them murderous. They're not especially aware of your presence when you try to pass them and not especially concerned about it when passing you, launching dive-bombs which you can't really accommodate once you've begun turning in because the handling model doesn't really allow for it. Since you can't make way, they'll hit you, at which point it's a 50/50 call on whether or not your cars adhere to each other, drag each other off-course/into a fence and lose 5 seconds before becoming untangled.

In summary, I enjoyed everything about Formula Legends except the experience of playing it. I might still come back to it in a Steam sale or something like that, just to play through it and see all the team and driver unlocks, alternate tracks and so on, and if I do, I'll play it in bite-size chunks so I don't constantly feel like putting my controller through a window.

[Naples39]

I bought and only briefly played the game.

I found the handling offputting. The way the steering ramp works, where there's kind of a delay before your steering wheel is fully rotated and there's little chance for mid-corner correction by feathering the throttle or steering, made driving a weird exercise is timing the turn-in. I knew people were already complaining about it, and there's already a patch for alternative steering.

The other 2 chief complaints people have is the AI smashing you about, and the track/difficulty balance. I'm sure they are working on patches for both issues, and we'll see what they come up with.

I also want to like this game, but I have such an enormous backlog of games I want to play, I'm completely comfortable letting the dust settle on the patches and trying again in a month or 2.

[Leadfoot5]

First patch that addresses handling was released. Hoping for an A.I. patch next.