SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: GT Legends

I experienced no problems installing or configuring GTL. Starforce copy protection is used in this title as it was in GTR. If that deters you, you can stop reading now and spend your time doing something else.

As we saw with rFactor, the new ISI gMotor (graphics motor) lets you choose between different shaders; DX7, DX8 and DX9. GTL does not look as good in DX7 as in newer shaders, but that would be more or less expected.

I ran a quick check through the various options menus and found most of the default options OK for a first try. The only place where I did any significant changes was in the controller menu, ensuring that I could use my Driving Force Pro's stick shift, as well as checking that force feedback was set to "full" and ticking the "reverse forces" checkbox. I then went for a spin in the Mini.

No force feedback effects were felt, so I had to go back in to the controller menu and click on the profile for a MOMO wheel. After that Force feedback was on and stayed on, until I entered a race at Magny-Cours in championship C, where the wheel lost all FFB effects except a little bit of vibration when driving on the rumble strips.

Graphics

From the screens posted here at SimHQ and on other sites there is no doubt that GTL is a very good-looking game.

Gustavo's cars look great and every car comes with its own highly accurate and historically correct interior. The cars even look great when you view them from your rear view mirrors.

If you don't know who Gustavo is, this fine artist was hired by SimBin as leading artist for GTL because for quite some years he had been the leading force in the making of the superb GPLEA cars for Grand Prix Legends. It was a very smart move by SimBin to hire Gustavo; the Michelangelo of GPL.

The cars really look spot on and are a great leap forward in terms of making them solid. When racing them, they are absolutely real in appearance. The tracks look gorgeous too, but as always there is the price of having to own a supercomputer, if you want to turn all the eye-candy to max and see GTL in its full glory.

One very welcome addition is that not only do you have driver's hands that move the steering wheel and move to the gearshift, you also have the driver's legs that actually move the accelerator! I like that.

The looks are OK with less than max settings and in DX8, and nice details like the flag marshal continuously making small movements adds to the general impression of a very beautiful game. Flags move naturally with the breeze which is a cool little detail.

Thinking a bit more about the flag marshals, SimBin should probably pay them better because I don't recall seeing the marshals waving blue and yellow flags around the various circuits more than once. As a matter of fact I don't think they wave the checkered flag either. Perhaps that is reserved for maximum graphics, or else I was too busy racing.

If your machine can handle it, try setting trackside animation to "on" and you will see small groups of spectators who are very animated in every sense of the word. One was so repeatedly animated every 3 seconds or so that I set the animation to off and left it there.

GT Legends uses GraphicsMotor2 which is the newest version of ISI's creations, also found in rFactor and so GTL also supports various shaders. You can select DX7 but it does mean that the game starts to look pretty ugly, and DX9 which on the reviewer's PC resulted in extremely low fps (no, I'm not upgrading just yet). DX8 looks good and gives good performance.

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