Formula Legends review: a treasure trove of retro F1 racing

You’re a game developer. You’d like to make a racing game, and before you there are two paths. Down one of them, you can see a lot of documents about soft body physics and meetings about tyre carcass temperature modelling, followed by Steam reviews left by people with 5,000 hours of play time who’ve given it two stars because they didn’t like a recent update.

Down the other path, you can see people sitting, playing your game, and smiling.

This is the path Italian developer 3DClouds chose for Formula Legends, a fantastically enjoyable encyclopedia of F1 past and present that takes a ruthless editor’s pen to all the bloat and simulation for the sake of it, and leaves only the parts that make racing fun.

That’s not to say it lacks depth. Yes, the colours may be bright, and the drivers’ heads may be of Mario Kart-size proportions, but Formula Legends requires deft inputs and brilliantly captures aspects of the real sport like changeable weather or clever race strategy that bring out the best stories.

It’s that fine balance of accessible handling and sim-like detail that makes this game tick, but let’s be honest with ourselves – it’s all the vintage F1 cars that brought us here in the first place.

Beginning in the early Sixties and covering several distinct points from each decade between then and the present day, Formula Legends offers an opportunity to drive – more or less – the entire history of the sport. And it does so without a single license from FOM. Very punk rock.

Instead, its cars, driver names and even track layouts are just recognisable enough for fans to understand the reference, but not so recognisable – at least, one dearly hopes – as to warrant legal action.

So you pick a vaguely familiar-sounding driver in their gorgeous familiar-looking vehicle and take to a race circuit with oddly familiar corners and undulations. You pick your tyres. And you race.

And this is where the first weakness makes itself known, because while marshalling a car around the track feels giddy and dangerous, inviting way more corner speed than you thought possible at first, battling for position isn’t as gratifying. AI behaviour isn’t particularly smart or adaptive to your moves, and collisions have a way of killing your momentum without producing spectacular events.

More than that, though, the way you drive these cars fast isn’t compatible with jockeying for places or making minor adjustments to your line. You go fast by picking a trajectory and sticking to it, carrying maximum momentum through the turn. The steering inputs just don’t easily allow the games of braking zone chicken that the real drivers engage in. You know, the ones with their letters in the right order.

Happily that’s not a game-breaker, because the real fun in Formula Legends is in managing the race. Tyre wear, that’s a thing. Fuel consumption too. Weather conditions change, varying the optimum tyre to be on at numerous points in the race. And if you get too crash-happy, your vehicle damage will affect performance and perhaps even prompt an unscheduled pit stop. So although overtaking might not feel like liquid gold, reading the race and picking your moments to pit is more than satisfying enough to make up for it.

It’s not just the machinery here that’s old school. Structurally this game’s pure PS2 era, without a season pass or a microtransaction in sight. It’s single-player only, which is lamentable but understandable given 3DClouds’ small studio size, and progressing through its career mode means racing across its many eras and unlocking more driver, car and season options as you go. Like so much of the game it’s very simple, but doesn’t make you long for more complexity.

We do confess to getting frustrated along the way, particularly when rolling the dice on worn tyres failed to pay off and instead we learned that when tyre wear reaches zero you trundle around at punitively slow speeds that effectively end your race – same goes for hitting 0 per cent car condition, though in fairness we should have seen that one coming.

There are jarring difficulty spikes along the way, too. Opponents who you might have utterly dominated one round ago in the suspiciously reminiscent Belgian forest are now crushing you on the streets of a certain French principality.

These minor annoyances pale in comparison to the joy of seeing F1’s history translated into playable eras like this, though. The raucous screams of the turbo era are very much present and correct, likewise the techy flap-fiddling of modern day racing, DRS and ERS in tow. Track layouts evolve over time, adding plenty of variation to the circuit roster. There’s love and passion in every vehicle livery and event here, and a brilliant blend of straightforward accessible driving and sim-like race management.