SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: GT Legends

GT Legends (GTL) is the second offering from developer SimBin, following the widely acclaimed GTR. In light of recent press releases from SimBin and a new company calling themselves Blimey!Games both take credit for making GTR and GTL. Incidentally, SimBin have hired new staff with previous experiences in the console area e.g. Rally Sport Challenge and Project Gotham, and Blimey!Games state clearly that they wish to develop games for "next-gen" equipment, usually the moniker for consoles.

An indication might be found in the direction that has been taken with GT Legends which features great graphics, great physics, great sounds and great looking cars, wrapped into very traditional arcade-like gameplay of having to unlock cars and tracks by participating in numerous racing events of varying lengths.

Don't take offense at the use of the word "arcade". Nothing derogatory towards arcade games is implied, but the word does accurately convey its meaning. Some like structure and fixed objectives in their games, others would rather explore at their own leisure. The world ought to be big enough for people of both persuasions.

When SimHQ representatives visited this year's E3 Expo, they were very excited about the seat-time they had with GT Legends. A career-mode was mentioned but it was not really explained in-depth, and naturally our representatives had no idea that the gameplay would be "forced" in the way that you have to go through the career-mode in order to access cars and tracks.

From the demo that was released we also had no indication as to the restricting career-mode.

Foretelling from the conclusion of this review, we can only note how disappointed we were when we saw the career-mode and learned that SimBin did not give us the option to choose the way we wanted to enjoy GT Legends. The SimHQ motorsports guys are in total agreement on this, so please mark this day in your calendar! GTL is huge in scope as it recreates the modern-day FIA GTC and TC Championships that are run with cars from the 60's and 70's. This makes it virtually impossible to do an in-depth review, test and verify all the things that should be tested and verified, and publish the review timely. Your experiences with GTL in case you have it, will be greatly appreciated, so why don't go and tell about your impressions and findings in our GTL Forum?

As already mentioned, GT Legends features historic cars that are being raced in our time, on present day motor racing circuits. FIA organizes the events and a web site about the different series and championships can be found here.

All in-game screenshots in this review were taken in 1024x768x32, 2x FSAA, trilinear filtering, and the game was run with the same settings, except no FSAA.

GT Legends Packaging Box Art and Manual

At least here in Europe, GTL comes in the standardized DVD-sized box which contains one disk (DVD-format), manual and an insert promoting GTL merchandise. The box art sold me, so I had to rip it off the shelf and pay the premium-priced game.

The manual is not the biggest we've seen, but in all fairness it does what can be expected of a manual these days: It fits in the DVD-box with room to spare, covers the very basics and contains information about the mapping of keys to functions. Amongst the things that aren't covered in the manual is how to take screenshots — at least we didn't find the information in there — another is how to back-up and reinstall your profile. The procedure is explained in detail here.

There actually is a keycard in the form of a printed explanation in black-and-white of what the various keys do. However while the keys themselves are explained in English, some text is in Finnish, Swedish and Spanish (I think) only.

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