Feral Interactive | $15/£10
- Loads of diverse vehicles and racing modes
- A technical marvel with top-tier graphics
- Slightly shallow story mode
It’s been seven long years since GRID Autosport came to the App Store, porting over a now 10-year-old console game.
Initially released in 2022, GRID Legends represents a genuine generational leap forward for the series. As such, it’s the ideal game to test out the new iPhone or iPad you got for Christmas.
This is the most technically ambitious racer on iOS
With that in mind, it’s worth first pointing out what a technical feat GRID Legends is. This is the kind of slick, detailed racer that we’re more accustomed to playing on our TVs, and you’ll need at least an iPhone 12 Pro or an M-series iPad (or the very latest iPad mini) to run it.
With appropriate hardware (we tested on an iPhone 15 Pro), this is one of the best racing games on mobile. It’s certainly the most comprehensive, though you really do need to play it with a physical controller. The default virtual controls simply don’t do it justice.
There’s a wide range of vehicles to race
Rather than focusing on a single type of racing, GRID Legends takes you through a dizzying multi-discipline offering, encompassing chunky touring cars, nimble open wheel racers, floor-sucking hyper cars, and much more besides.
Each car handles distinctively, yet can be easily handled by relative racing novices. You’re granted the opportunity from the off to set your preferred difficulty, but even so-called Hard mode offers up forgiving driving aids, braking indicators, and obliging AI opponents. Thankfully, these settings can be fine-tuned.
Collisions create on-track rivalries
The meat of the game is a regular Career mode that covers all of the different racing disciplines, and which lets you acquire and upgrade cars, take on sponsors, and develop your relationship with your co-driver. The headline here, however, is Story mode.
It might sound unusual to have a narrative element in a racing game, but original developer Codemasters has been tinkering with such a thing since 2002’s TOCA Race Driver (full disclosure: I worked QA on that game years before becoming a journo). That’s not to say it feels like a particularly natural fit, with rather stilted live action ‘documentary’ sequences interspersed with prescribed racing scenarios (finish fifth, or ahead of a rival, for example) for you to tick off.
The cut scenes are a little drab
The aforementioned live action scenes are reasonably well acted, with one or two faces you might even recognize. However, the writing is perfunctory and the drama feels disconnected from the actual racing, despite the addition of contextual in-car comms.
You are an anonymous amateur racer catapulted into a struggling racing team. From here the game tries to engineer rivalry and tension, but with your on-track exploits failing to modify the story beyond simple progression, it all feels rather shallow. The whole thing seems to have been engineered to appeal to a post-Drive to Survive crowd less interested in actual racing than the drama and personalities behind it.
You really need a controller to get the most out of the game
Ignore the flimsy Story mode, though, and GRID Legends has much to offer as the most lavish racer on the App Store.