Since we haven't seen a new Motorstorm title in almost 15 years, Grid now qualifies in pole position for being my favourite current racing series - But ironincally, the series was the width of a coat of paint away from going on the shitlist.
If you're unaware, the trophy list for the Grid reboot for the PS4 included a trophy that required you to drive the in-game mileage equivalent to a full rotation of planet earth. That's 24,860 miles if you're counting - and it still sounds utterly ludicrous today.
If it wasn't for the fact there's a fairly passive method for obtaining this trophy, there's a large statistical chance I wouldn't even be writing this review - Which would have been a great shame.
However, here we are, with the first iteration of Grid for the Playstation 5.
Subtitled Legends, this is pretty much more of what you can expect if you're familiar with the Grid series. It's never really changed the formula that drastically over the years. However, it does break some new ground by adding a couple of notably interesting layers to the game.
The game debuts it's Story mode. Driven to Glory allows you to play out the tale of a new start up team looking to conquer the Grid World Series and topple team Ravenwest, as you progress to catch and ultimately surpass them as top dog in the Grid racing world. It's complete with in-depth story-telling accompanied with cinematic cutscenes, real life characters and an actual script with plot development. The production value is high and you can tell alot of effort has gone into making it work as you progress through various chapters which require you to fulfil certain race objectives in order to unlock the next portion of the story.
My only real criticism is that the plot is so linear, it suffers from some borderline hilarious continuity errors. I've just won my 8th race in a row - Why are you playing a cutscene back to me emphasising the point that we can't seem win a race? Some more dynamic plot developments that reflected your actual race results would have added some excellent depth but it's still a nice idea and refreshing to see something genuinely new to the series that isn't just a lick of paint.
More familiar modes include a Career - Which is more traditional and comes fully fleshed out with a series of events catered to various levels, spanning a variety of different event types and car classes. There's also a custom Race Creation mode (which comes in really handy for large parts of this trophy list) and an Online mode - All of which have been staple inclusions to the Grid series over the years.
Grid Legends is also way more expansive too. More race locations with greater variations of circuits, more manufacturers and car models and the additions of some new vehicle classes and event types keep things feeling fresh. Keeping up with the modern world, Electric cars make their debut, and require you to pick up boosts around the track in order to maintain their performance. Multi-Class events pit vehicles of different power against each other, giving preset time handicaps to the faster variations on the grid. Drifting, Time Attack and Eliminator all return for more.
The customisation options are still a bit too shallow, especially if you're into fine tuning vehicle performance to squeeze those extra couple of seconds out of lap times, but Grid Legends does still lean more towards the arcade side of racing, so it's not exactly too surprising these options are shallow. The graphics didn't exactly blow me away, especially for a debut into a new generation of console, but the weather and time of day effects look as good as they ever have.
It's a solid addition to the series, and for as long as it just continues to gradually build upon what it already does really well - Which is just offer a good, hearty racing experience, it will continue to be my favourite. Avoiding the decisions to include honking trophies will always help too, of course.
Speaking of which, the trophy list contains 51 trophies, including the Platinum trophy, and you won't need to drive endlessly for hundreds of hours in order to achieve them all this time. Huge step forward. It's actually a fairly linear route to full completion that will only require you to touchpoint a couple of the games modes.
Firstly, a foray into the aforementioned Story Mode in order to collect a handful of progression-based trophies linked to completing all 36 chapters.
The "THIS IS IT" trophy, awarded for Completing Story chapter - THIS IS IT, signifies the conclusion of the Story mode as you unlock a total of 10 trophies linked to progressing through all 36 chapters - Around 20% of the entire list.
I don't mean this to sound like a smarmy criticism, because the Story mode, if taken for what it is at face value - Something a bit different - is absolutely fine. However, the overriding feeling I had coming out the other side was that it just felt like a glorified tutorial/introduction to the game.
Each of the 36 chapters will put you in a different scenario that you'll need to fulfil, and it isn't always necessarily about winning a race. Sometimes it's simply just about driving around the track in order to link a couple of plot-points together, which is where the more casual, tutorial-esque feeling stems from. You can play it on a chosen difficulty level, but this doesn't influence the trophies in any way, and it rarely feels like this actually matters, due to the more casual nature of the tasks generally required from chapter to chapter.
Maybe it's just because I'd consider myself to be a bit more of an experienced player than what this mode ultimately demands, but it felt like a warm up to the rest of the game, and you can complete this mode within around 5-6 hours. If the underlying idea was indeed to give newer players the opportunity to cut their teeth on the Grid experience, then I'm absolutely fine with that.
Next, into the main event. The Career. Despite the addition of the Story, this is still where the heart of the Grid experience lies, and the Career mode spans across 4 different career classes. These include Rookie, Semi-Pro, Pro and The Final Gauntlet. Each of these different classes contains a variety of different race categories to get stuck into, with a selection of different events to complete underneath each one. The overall goal is to progress enough in order to reach the Gauntlet, and win it.
The "What a Legend!" trophy, awarded for Completing the Gauntlet in Career Mode, is the culmination of surging through the ranks and beating a series of races in a Gauntlet style format to the very top. There are a collection of 9 different events that make up the Gauntlet and you'll need to win them all to unlock the trophy.
The important thing to note about Career progression is that you won't need to win every event before the Gauntlet in order to progress towards it. In fact, the trophy list is actually really baron on Career-specific trophies. It doesn't require you to win a certain amount of events. It doesn't require you to play through the Career to a specific difficulty level. It doesn't force you to favour events you might not want to race because you prefer the other options.
All you need to do is fulfil the race requirements for a specific event, and that doesn't always involve winning the race. It could just be earning a podium finish or sometimes even finishing as low as 5th will be considered enough to progress. Fulfilling these requirements will count towards unlocking the next Career class. Repeat this process from Rookie, to Semi-Pro, to Pro, and you'll then unlock the Gauntlet to which you'll eventually earn this trophy. It's a very simple route to success and the flexibility of being able to pick and choose which events you want to progress is a big decision in influencing the overall difficulty of the game.
I opted to play on Expert difficulty, which is the second highest available, and generally found this a reasonably fair level of challenge. Time Attack events spike the difficulty heavily, for some reason, but every other event was very doable. Any Career event I felt like I was going to potentially waste too much time on, I just bypassed anyway, as per the relaxed requirements to progression. AI drivers will only really become aggressive if they become your nemesis, and don't tend to display dynamic race behaviours. Crashes always look artificial too - Cars will just randomly spin or flip for no apparent reason, rather than a direct cause of misjudging a manoeuvre or genuine accidents, for example.
The overall length of time to complete the Career Mode is somewhere in the region of 30-40 hours. It does suffer from some unnecessary time-padding though. Some events will be locked until you reach a certain tier with a certain car - usually featured within a prior event. In order to upgrade tiers, you'll need to accumulate mileage within that vehicle. Tier 3 requires 35 miles, and in instances where there is only a single prior event to rack this mileage up, you'll complete that event and remain well short of the target mileage to unlock the next one.
This means you have to either play through the event over until you reach the required mileage to unlock the next one, or make use of one of the other extra-curricular modes in order to just rack up the mileage that way instead. It's a clear case of inorganic longevity by design.
Completion of the Career mode will signify the end of the actual game itself, and whilst there aren't that many trophies directly related to the Career, you'll unlock some naturally as you go through the variety of events on your way to and including, The Final Gauntlet. However, the post-game isn't exactly a simple case of clean up protocol, and there's still a reasonable amount of work to do to earn the Platinum trophy.
Firstly, the remainder of the list contains a big chunk of miscellaneous trophies, simply awarded for setting up some very specific race requirements. The creativity with some of these is excellent, especially with some of the one-off events you'll set up, but some of them are just pure grind. I said at the top of the piece the Race Creator mode eventually comes in handy for large parts of this list, and this is exactly where those particular fruits are laboured.
However, it does also play a more crucial role in assisting the completion of sponsorship objectives. There are 6 trophies awarded for unlocking a specific car by completing it's correlating sponsor objective. Sponsors are found in the Team management section of the game, and each sponsor comes with a list of 3 objectives you need to fulfil in order to unlock an event in which you can win a car.
This is where I maybe missed a trick early on. Selecting sponsors allows you to progress these through the Career mode, and I wasn't aware of this when I was going through it. This meant all of my progression had to be achieved post-game instead, and some of these objectives are very grindy.
Driving 62 miles in a certain type of vehicle, which just involved creating a race in the Race Creation tool and driving around a track for an entire hour. Winning a specific Career event multiple times, which I'd already done once, but hadn't set up the sponsorship for as per above, so needed to repeat. Performing a high number of specific on-track actions during races. Just a few examples of the less favourable and grindy objectives to see in the list.
Another thing that's important to note too. You need to complete all 3 objectives before changing a sponsor, otherwise the progress is wiped and overwritten by the next sponsor you choose to work on. This is also counter-productive - It would have been easier to be able to progress all sponsors openly, and accumulate their requirements simultaneously, rather than have the game force you to work on one at a time. If you want me to accumulate 62 miles in Electric Vehicles, but you won't allow me to change the sponsor without losing that progress, then how am I expected to do that within the Career mode without repeating the same event and stagnating my own progress? It's a poor design choice, and it's a large part of the reason why the game has a bit of a grindy post-game vibe to it. Ironically, it's also why the Race Creation mode is such a crucial back up option.
It actually felt like the post-game clean up was the longest part of this Platinum trophy. It accounts for well over half the trophies in the entire list, and even though you can tandem some of them together if you plan appropriately, it still felt like it went on forever. There isn't anything within the menus from what I could see that tracks overall playtime, so this is harder to quantify, but it certainly didn't feel like a quick clean up process.
There are no online trophies present here, despite there being a fully fledged Multiplayer mode. Grid hasn't been shy of including these within lists of the past, and some of them have been hugely demanding, so the choice to omit them from the trophy list entirely this time round will be a welcome decision for some.
Grid has been an unforgiving beast in the past. From patience-testing online grinds to the absurdity of clocking up excessive numbers of mileage - It's recent Platinum trophies haven't been for the faint of heart. Grid Legends does take a noticeable step back from all of this. The chunky Career Mode combined with the post-game grind will ensure this tips into the 60+ hour range for total completion time, but with no pressure to play through the game on a specific difficulty level at any point, along with the flexibility of being able to take shortcuts in the Career progression, this does ultimately come in round about midway of the difficulty scale.
Notable Trophies -
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| THIS IS IT - Complete Story - THIS IS IT. What a Legend! - Complete The Gauntlet in Career Mode. |
Hardest Trophy -
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