Grid Legends gets back on track with an intriguing story mode

Grid Legends, launching in February, will be Codemasters’ second crack at a Netflix-style narrative mode, capitalizing on the mainstream interest in F1: Drive to Survive, whose fourth season should premiere soon. Last year, the racing game specialists delivered “Braking Point,” a story campaign for F1 2021 that, although it lacked much replay value, was genuinely engaging and hit the kind of story beats that make Drive to Survive successful.


The challenge before Grid Legends’ “Driven to Glory” is to pull off the same thing with a fictitious racing league where the viewer has no context or expectations outside the game.


Drive to Survive is a story of rivalries, after all, and fans understand the baggage that the teams and the drivers bring to every race. The Grid World Series, an intriguing, multi-class worldwide tour, gets the fly-on-the-wall documentary treatment similar to Drive to Survive, but this format works best when the viewer is familiar with the subjects going in.


That’s not to say the story is boring; it’s just difficult to tease out what’s really eating the ensemble cast of characters in Driven to Glory. The mode is a typical superstar-on-the-rise tale, with the player as the center of attention. Driven to Glory spans 36 races, most of which begin with a two- or three-minute full-motion cinematic shot in mixed reality, the method The Mandalorian made famous. Ncuti Gatwa (Netflix’s Sex Education) is the biggest star, as the breezy antagonist Valentin Manzi, who races for up-and-coming rival team Voltz.


The player is the second driver on team Seneca, a striving privateer outfit headed by Marcus Ado (Miles Yekinni). Your teammate is Yume Tanaka, who is moderately cooperative but mostly aloof to you, the new kid on the block. And lurking out there is the Ravenwest team, the class of the field, seeking their sixth Grid World Series championship.


The story held my attention, but its enjoyment doesn’t supersede the racing action. As to that, let me revise an earlier criticism I made of Grid Legends in a preview back in November. The jerkiness and the lurching as the third-person camera emphasizes each gear change seems to have been modulated. Or, I don’t know, I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed two months ago and once I saw the shifting effect, couldn’t unsee it. But the build I was given smoothed things out nicely, and I felt like I was hitting my braking points and apexes more naturally.

 


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