GT Legends review

I am untrustworthy. At least that’s the conclusion reached by the self-appointed automotive experts from Auto Sim Sport, regarding the various mainstream reviews of GTR. But I stand firm on two points: I am a mainstream reviewer, and I honestly think that GTR is the best and most enjoyable driving sim I have ever tried. Until today.

GT Legends is in my opinion a worthy successor to GTR, and furthermore (now I’m really going out on a limb) it’s a very good attempt to make an heir to the racing throne currently inhabited by the phenomenal Grand Prix Legends by Papyrus. It has the same spirit, but I hope the sales figures won’t be as dismally low.

Historical racing

GT Legends is based upon FIA-GTC ’65 and ’76; it has Grand Touring cars up until 1965 and 1976 respectively, as well as FIA-TC ’65 and ’76, which are smaller Touring vehicles from the same years as the GT cars. Simbin did not strive for absolute realism, so the track selection doesn’t match the FIA season slavishly. If this is a good or a bad thing is for you to decide, but I think that tracks such as Spa, Monza, Anderstorp, Hockenheim, Mondello and the devious Zolder are quite brilliant choices, which suit the vintage cars nicely.

The tracks have been modelled with the usual meticulousness by the Simbin team, so if there’s a bump on a real-world track, chances are you’ll come across it in the game as well. Personally, I think the dead squirrel on the first corner of Zolder really took the idea of realism a little too far… But jokes aside, Zolder really is an example of how well Simbin can make tracks. The first time I encountered it in a game was in the scandalously overlooked Mercedes Benz Truck Racing, where it was tremendously slippery. Sand blows onto the track, and you can actually see this in GT Legends. Also, the reduced grip gives you the perfect excuse for a bit of powersliding.

Soulful vintage cars

"You start out in a Mini Cooper," I read with great dismay in a preview. Another game with useless filler cars, I thought immediately. This phenomenon is especially common among console racers, and last time I saw it was in the otherwise excellent rfactor. Here, these smaller cars handled like watered down garden tractors.

But luckily, this is not the case in GT Legends. The Mini Cooper has rightfully been called a giant-slayer, because it can actually compete with mighty muscle cars on smaller tracks with the right driver behind the wheel.

This is a general quality in all the different cars of GT Legends – they all excel at different things, which makes it a joy to experiment. Min favourites of the moment are the legendary Alfa GTA, which just loves to drive sideways, and the brutal AC Cobra with its overpowered engine that threatens to throw you off the track at any given excuse. And if you’ve heard and driven the Detomaso Pantera, you too will have lost your heart to one brutal racing car.

The list of fabulous classic vehicles is very long; let me mention some off the top of my head: Ford GT40, Ford Escort RS2000, Ford Capri, Lotus Cortina, etc., etc. We get 90 cars in total, from 25 different makers. You can simply buy some of them if you have the money, but you must earn the others.

A meaty career mode

GT Legends builds upon ISI’s new gmotor2 graphics engine, which also has a career feature. In ISI’s own rfactor, the career mode was a boring money-collecting affair, but Simbin has polished the system to my great delight.

The career mode has been split into different levels. You must complete one level in order to advance to the next. You set the difficulty yourself, and I promise you that you’ll face quite a challenge on the hardest level. But then again, the harder the difficulty setting is, the more money you’ll win.

So far, that might not sound terribly interesting, but the different levels come with different challenges. For instance, you will get specific races such as an all-Corvette race with cars of the same specs. Here, nothing but your driving skills will save you.
The game also offers various what-if? challenges.

Here, you will be put up against powerful cars in a small car of your choice. This resulted in an exciting race for me, during which I knew that if I lagged behind on the long straight, I’d be in serious trouble. But on the tortuous winding sections, my Alfa Romeo GTA would dominate the larger heavy cars with its superior manoeuvrability.

Competent AI

Another good aspect of the career mode is the competent driving by the AI cars. Simbin was already on the right path in this regard with GTR, and work on the AI continued even after the release of the game. And as long as you stayed on the track and raced like you were supposed to, things were fine, but unforeseen situations confused the computer.

These weaknesses are history now, and the AI can overtake competently, drive closely and generally seem capable of racing well. This is important, seeing that some of the later challenges will have you doing many laps against the AI. But it works, and because you can also save the races when you want, this part of GT Legends also wins my warmest recommendations.

Is there such a thing as sound-porn?

Vroouuuummm. Vroum, vroom. It’s hard to convey such delightful sound in writing. I definitely am at a loss for words that will describe just how nice the cars in GT Legends sound. However, I can tell you that Simbin has created unique sounds for all of the cars, all of which sound very close to their real-life counterparts.

I’ve been criticising Simbin for choosing poor music for the game menus before, but this time it’s spot-on too. There’s a nice 70’s mood to it, which corresponds well to the theme and the Gulf Racing-inspired menu design.

New and improved graphics

The new Gmotor2 graphics engine yields nice DX9 effects, with all sorts of sweet details. The game looks ridiculously good when time progresses and day turns into night during a race. You can define how much time this takes, but in any case it is quite a sight to behold when the sun sets, turning the evening sky crimson and orange, and the shadows get longer.

The tracks have been overhauled with several new details and animated elements, which make them look more lively. But Simbin has not exactly reached perfection yet. The new graphics demand a lot from your machine, and the shadows take an unreasonable toll. As far as I can gather from what I read, noone runs the game with the shadow settings on maximum.

On ISI’s webpage, it says that this is a known gmotor 2 issue, which will be corrected in a patch for rfactor, which also gives hope for GT Legends. As things look now, we mere mortals are forced to tone our settings down a lot, but the game still doesn’t run that great.

A few tracks seem especially badly optimised in comparison with the rest. This is a bit disappointing, and it’s easy to speculate that size does matter in this engine. This means that any hope for another huge, classic track for GT Legends is probably futile. Racing enthusiasts will know which track I’m referring to…

Trading paint online

rfactor has the best multiplayer code I’ve ever come across in a racing game. Of course I’m not speaking as a programmer here, but as a pleasantly surprised user, who enjoyed how well the game ran online. This is why it puzzles me that Simbin hasn’t chosen to use this code for their game, when it already uses the graphics engine from rfactor. It probably has to do with licensing, or some such sinister concept, but the fact remains that Simbin has created their own network code.

My honest impression is that it isn’t as good as what we see in rfactor, and only a marginal improvement on that of GTR. Still, I’m basing these assumptions solely on what I’ve experienced so far, and my opinion might change several times. But the game is often laggy online, and the old problem with the entire game suffering if even one player has a bad ping seems to be back. Officially, the game only supports 16 players at a time, which might have been good in the heyday of Grand Prix Legends, but doesn’t really cut it nowadays, when I’ve seen several games that support 30+ players.

Still, these issues don’t stop me from having some enjoyable races online. They’re just as exciting as their offline counterparts, and I’m sure that GT Legends will become really fun online after a little tweaking, and that the various online racing leagues will accept it.

A recommendation with reservations

There is no doubt that I enjoy playing GT Legends very much, and that I think it’s a fantastic game, but sadly I also feel that Simbin might have released it a little too soon.

The online mode is not entirely satisfactory, and even has specific graphical errors such as a lack of shadows underneath the cars, and this mars the general picture a bit. And the graphical performance on certain tracks should perhaps also have been optimised. Simbin’s advice to users suffering under the extreme hardware demands, is that they should try reducing the number of cars on the tracks or stay clear of night racing, but since you can’t set these parameters in the career mode, this is a very cheap solution.

During career races on Mondello, an especially demanding track, my framerate fluctuated between 20 and 60 fps. It felt like my car had become manic-depressive, when it chugged along at one moment, only to drive fluidly the next.

The game also suffers from all too frequent crashes to the desktop, as well as all-out system lockups, and this leaves me with the impression that the game really could have used a bit more time in development. We can hope for a patch soon, but as the game is now, the overall grade has to go down a notch, even though it does technically contain just about everything I could possibly wish for in a racing sim.

Source: Boomtown Denmark
English version by: Jonatan A. Allin (neonwolf)