You all know the story of Mike Shoemaker, right? And his brother… ‘Malf’?
You might think you do, but you definitely don’t, OK? Because as you are told on screen when loading up Formula Legends, “any resemblance to real-world drivers, teams, circuits, sponsors or events is purely coincidental”.
Looking through the list of those names, many of which are hilariously endearing, there just happen to be a lot of coincidences in this new game.
But we’re here for it.
Filling a void
Ever since the official F1 games did away with historical content, fans have been starved of ways to race classic cars and experience the evolution grand prix racing has been through over nearly eight decades. Unless you’re a hardcore PC sim racer who is willing to master the art of modding various existing titles.
Against that backdrop, the arrival of a light-hearted game like Formula Legends, which launched this week and celebrates F1-style racing past and present, is very welcome.
It isn’t meant to be a simulation, but behind its fun-looking, cartoon-like exterior, it doesn’t take long to realise that this isn’t some silly Mario Kart wannabe. It’s been put together by a small, independent team in Italy that gets racing, and wants to pay homage to its history.
The result is that you can race cars from 16 different eras of definitely-not-F1 history, spanning from the late-1960s to the present day. That allows you to experience the birth of aerodynamics, the brutal turbo era, the screams of the V10s and V8s, and the complexity of the hybrids.
It’s very close to the ‘Eras’ game mode I pitched for the official F1 games back in 2023. So understandably I was thrilled when this game was announced. And for the Bring Back V10s podcast listeners among you, we’re covered as well as you could hope, from the “Late ‘80s” class featuring Byron Renna and Alan Proust, through three different categories from the 1990s, plus “Early ‘00s” before the cars evolve into their smaller V8 siblings.
As well as the huge variety of car types (and endless comedy unofficial names - from Jack Stewie and Jimmy Clerks to Ferdinando Alfonso and Luis Hammerton), the same care and attention has been taken with the circuits.
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There are 14 tracks in the game, but those with longer histories can be represented with up to three different versions, ranging from basic 1960s/70s layouts featuring hardly any barriers or kerbs, to the 21st century wide open, nicely painted, car-park run-off style tracks of today, sometimes with a 1980s/90s variant in between as well. The most stark difference between the eras is at the German circuit, where the earliest version is inspired by the Nordschleife, before the layout is drastically shortened and sanitised in later generations. A very nice touch.
Even before you hit the track, you can tell this has been put together by a team of developers writing their own love letter to motor racing past and present.
Locked content
So what happens when you finally hit the track? For starters, although the game features 14 circuits (plus variants) and 16 car eras each with seven different liveries, it's not all available to you when you fire up for the first time.
I’ve never been a fan of buying a title and the full game not being available to you from the off. Formula Legends is very reasonably priced, and there’s no pay-to-win or pay-to-upgrade stuff here, fortunately, but if you buy a game, you should get all of its content. Unfortunately, a couple of tracks are locked until you play them in the game’s ‘Story Mode’, as are several of the era-dependent variants of those circuits.
The same applies to the cars. You have access to at least a couple of teams in each era so you can play in any historical category from the off, but the rest have to be unlocked, often as rewards for completing a certain amount of mileage, or achieving a specific number of results, as that team in other eras.
I see the logic of having some incentives that can be unlocked without having to complete the Story Mode, as you can set up your own single races and championships where achievements can count towards some of those unlock targets. But it’s a bit of a shame when you take a podium finish for the mid-2000s version of the ‘Will Win’ team, you get told you only need another nine podiums with that team to unlock one of its drivers from a previous decade.
If that’s supposed to inspire players to stick with the game for longer, for someone like me it’s more likely to have the opposite effect. Give me every car, driver and circuit, and I’ll create endless championships and wear my controller out re-living F1 history.
Frustrating 'Story Mode'
Then again, that’s what the Story Mode is there for, right? You can pick different mini-series from every era featured in the game, sometimes unlocking new elements just by completing races, whereas other rewards are based on where you finish.
But our early attempts at getting stuck into Story Mode were a little frustrating, as it exposes a couple of the game’s weaknesses.
Firstly, the difficulty levels (there are three to choose from) fluctuate too much from track to track. So you can be fighting for a podium spot in Germany, then head to Belgium where you’ll qualify three seconds off the back of the field. In longer races it’s quite dull driving around to finish half a minute down, just so you’ve checked off another race and might have unlocked something.
Strategic racing
That’s a shame, because the varied race-length options can pair brilliantly with the strategic elements of the races. Tyre wear and fuel usage can have a real impact on how events play out. Often you have to weigh up trying to nurse a set of tyres to the end while others bail out for a fresh set, and you really can feel the performance drop off as the rubber wears out.
It goes the other way, too, and every race is different. Just because the AI all made a tyre change halfway through one race at a certain circuit, doesn't mean they will all follow the same strategy again the next time you race there with exactly the same race settings. So you can find yourself thinking you've nailed a pre-determined strategy for a race by making an early pitstop, only to find that most of your opponents have stayed out this time, and you never catch them back up. That will definitely help make every race situation feel replayable.
Refuelling is applied in eras where that was the case in real racing, and these elements can be customised outside of the Story Mode to give you the type of racing you want regardless of what the real rules were at the time.
As well as strategy, the pitstops themselves are great fun, as they’ve been turned into a mini game reminiscent of the mid-2000s PlayStation F1 games. You have to hit a combination of four buttons in the right order to change your tyres as quickly as possible, while using your controller’s triggers to top up fuel or fix your car’s health if required.
It’s a great mix of quick-fire interactivity paired with strategy. Do you spend extra time in the pits to get your car’s health back to 100%? Is it worth the lost track position? It’s a brilliant extra little wrinkle that makes you realise how seriously developer 3D Clouds has taken this creation.
On-track challenges
Talking of track position, we’ve found that it is very important, because wheel-to-wheel battles are pretty tough. This is for two reasons: firstly, the AI opponents aren’t always great at sharing the track with you, and the player car seems to come off worst in most collisions (just like the official F1 games, then!), and secondly because the game’s control set-up makes it quite difficult to make the minor, precise adjustments needed to avoid those robust AI rivals.
The developers are up front about the fact that the game isn’t meant to be easy to master from your very first lap. You need to know the circuits, and pick up on the differences between each car era, to string a perfect lap together.
That’s understandable. And when you do get the hang of a particular circuit in a certain type of car, there’s a genuine sense of achievement, because you have to work at it to be quick.
However, part of the reason you have to work at it is because the handling isn’t that responsive. It all feels quite spongy, so you have to anticipate the corners and turn in a little earlier than feels natural. If you miss that turn in point, the car will wallow a long way from the apex and there’s very little you can do about it.
In most car categories in the game you can master it, particularly when lapping alone. But quick changes of direction required for things like tighter chicanes are almost impossible, because the steering is too slow to react no matter how quickly you flick from turning one way to the other. And the same goes for ducking and diving between opponents that are unlikely to give you much racing room.
The slightly imprecise nature of the controls also exposes another element that makes the Story Mode frustrating: track limits. These are very strictly enforced in the game, and over a short race you can find yourself (and even the AI) notching up several seconds of penalties for pretty minor indiscretions. You can turn them off in custom mode, it’s just a shame you need to do so much unlocking via the Story Mode to get the most out of setting up your own races and championships.
Added bonus for PC players
This piece started by having some fun with the unofficial names in the game, which brings us back to a good point to finish off with: modding.
PC players will be able to edit all of the names and liveries in the game, so if the amusing unofficial approach isn’t for you, it likely won’t be long before you can rename teams such as MC Lauden, Ferenzo and Whitehorn (plus a special mention to ‘Brownie GP’!), and their drivers Osvald Pastry, Charlie Lacreme or Mark Peerstallen (whose Dad, ‘Jon’ appears in the 1990s). Plus there will surely be some spectacular user-generated recreations of iconic liveries from F1 history.
It’s a shame there appears to be no editing capacity for console players, especially given this is meant to be a more accessible game that’s not just for the PC hardcore. OK, you can’t open up the code of your game in the same way for Xbox or PlayStation players, but the option to edit names and perhaps even adjust existing colours on the game’s default liveries would have allowed some fun tinkering for those who appreciate the lengths the developers have gone to to hint at the liveries of the cars they are paying homage to.
I’d rather spend longer playing around with things like that rather than having to unlock cars, drivers and tracks!
Overall, the gripes about this game are pretty minor, there’s just a few that can all mount up at the same time to give you a frustrating race where you drive around alone at the back of the pack picking up time penalties and failing to unlock any new content.
But when it all comes together, it’s worth it. What will keep me coming back are the races where I chased home ‘Gelson Pisquer’ as his early-1980s ‘Tram Tram’ team-mate and we both had to dive for tyres in the closing stages allowing ‘Al John’ to steal the win, or my race-long, multi-stop V8-era battle with Bastien Kettel and Jason Blunton. Those are the moments that encapsulate what this game is supposed to be about.
When everything lines up, as it can with the right combination of circuit, car type, difficulty and race length/strategy settings, you can have a tremendous amount of fun. I’ve played it for hours already and will definitely keep diving back in.
Formula Legends is out now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
