If we go by this and last year’s releases, we are living in the age of the retro arcade racer. We need two hands to count the number of retro rally games that grab back to the 90s arcade and PlayStation era alone. The same goes for the kart subgenre. Between all this, some try not to recreate games from the past, but to recreate the nostalgia of motorsports itself. Our subject at hand, Formula Legends, does exactly this. It projects an arcade-like, mini-fied and Micro Machines-style approach on the complete history of F1 racing, all the way back to the 1960s. That’s seven decades of history!
Thorough but unlicensed
Historically, Formula Legends is very thorough within the boundaries it is permitted. It has no licenses at all when it comes to teams, drivers, and tracks but works around it in an almost nostalgic way by slightly butchering names of grids spanning across decades. Sponsors and liveries are recognizable enough to get a grasp on who and what you are battling on track. Do you like to take the role of a midfield 70s or 80s driver like Patrick Tambay? Sure, you can select Pat Tambury in his Ligier, eh, “Lawgier”.
Decades for racing
Not all drivers and teams are available from the start. You need to unlock them by competing in championships that are split up by decade, each containing a short competition set in the early, middle, and end of said decade. All have car models and liveries representing the specific era in racing. Even the tracks evolve over time, where hay bales liven up the track decor in the early years, the late 2020s sport the now common colored tarmac runoff areas.
Attention to detail
It is safe to say a lot of care went into the nostalgic details of the game. The racing itself is very arcade-like but still wants you to follow the basic rules of motor racing. Brake before a corner and stick to the racing line for the best results. Initially, I had a lot of trouble keeping the car on the road, but a good week before the time of writing a patch added an alternative steering option that completely resolved the steering issues I suffered and players had rightfully complained about in user reviews. Now, with the reconfigured steering, controlling the car feels spot on, especially in the more modern decade’s cars. The older 60s and 70s cars still turn like boats, but that is intentional and accurate with the lack of downforce, I suppose. Still, this makes the first six championships horrible to play. Fortunately, you are in no way required to play the championships in a specific order. You can hop between decades freely, always having the early part of each decade unlocked. Based on your performance, you unlock the middle and end parts.
Competition
The competition is fierce, especially in the early decades where not only the opposition is tough, but the cars themselves are a handful too. I had a hard time getting anywhere near the back markers in these races, and my only option was to tune down the difficulty. Turning on brake assist and traction control had a big impact on performance, and with the on/off gas and braking on the non-analog Switch controls, it’s more or less a necessity. The game is clearly not built for digital controls, and without playing any other port of the game, I can sense that the advantages of analog controls must be massive. Older cars coming out of slow corners make you spin off left and right. Turning on the assists nullifies that behavior completely. Later series still benefit from the assists but are much more enjoyable on normal difficulty.
Performance on Switch
Apart from the way Formula Legends handles the Switch’s digital controls, there are several giveaways that the Switch port is a bit of an afterthought. What really puts this in the foreground is the abysmal performance. First, the framerate. While Formula Legends runs at a pretty stable 30 frames during qualifying rounds or with just a few opponents on screen, once the screen fills up with other cars, the game experiences huge framerate drops. Driving through tight corners, even alone, causes the same thing. In those occasions, it also tends to add camera collision issues if there isn’t enough room for the camera to go alongside the track.
The second performance -or rather porting- issue I encountered is that the in-race resolution becomes so dithered and blocky that details on the car and track are difficult to see. Depending on the decade you race in, it adds a blueish or yellowish hue over the screen to add some retro atmosphere, making everything even harder to see and resulting in a muddy, oversaturated mess. Last and certainly not least is the texture and object pop-in. This port of Formula Legends has a hard time showing skid mark textures when needed, let alone textures on buildings. Buildings regularly pop up halfway down a straight. This port commits all sorts of visual atrocities that games were getting slammed for 30 years ago.
Platform comparison
I played my playthrough on Switch 2, and obviously that does not enhance the game by any means. Judging by footage of various other ports found on the internet, I’m pretty certain this is an issue with the Switch ports specifically, although framerate drops and pop-in occurred in footage of other versions as well.
Effort and content
Getting back to the gameplay, it is obvious that the developer went through a lot of effort to create three versions of every track, dozens of sets of cars, and 42 different driver helmets, all accurate enough to make any visitor of a historical Grand Prix tingle with joy. After the update, the way cars control makes for an enjoyable and fairly accurate racing experience. Within its direct competition though, New Star GP had the exact same idea, with a head start of almost two years if we count its early access period. It is fair, for those in the market for only one historical arcade F1 racer, to pitch the two against each other.
Comparing to New Star GP
Although New Star GP offers a low-poly “Virtua Racing” look, it shares the same core idea of progressing through decades of F1 racing while driving recognizable unlicensed cars on unlicensed GP tracks. Formula Legends has much more attention to detail, with car textures making vehicles more recognizable and more variation in off-track scenery that draws you deeper into racing nostalgia. New Star GP aims more for “simulation F1 racing” nostalgia. The latter ticks the ‘Geoff Crammond F1’ box more, offering a realistic experience wrapped in stylized graphics. But New Star GP is a technically better game, with a smoother driving experience, more stability, and no technical issues. It also adds a more story-driven playthrough with team interactions. New Star GP, however, locks the later decades behind campaign progression, which Formula Legends avoided by splitting each decade into three parts, with two of the three to unlock.
Final Thoughts
For a lifelong F1 fan, watching races since the mid-80s and visiting a dozen Grands Prix in Belgium, Germany, Singapore, and the Netherlands since 1990, the historical context Formula Legends offers is astonishing. It presents three different track layouts per GP, transforming not only layout but trackside details like runoff areas, buildings, and decorations as well. On the surface, it offers quite an enjoyable racing game. However, due to the clumsy AI, it’s sometimes more enjoyable in qualification than in actual races. The framerate issues certainly play a role in that. I’m pretty sure, even with evidence of framerate issues on other platforms, that Formula Legends should be played on anything other than the Nintendo Switch. As for this version, it’s knocked out of Q1 due to technical issues and the stiff competition in the crowded retro arcade racing genre.
While, as an F1 fan, I admire the attention to detail that went into faithfully cramming seven decades of F1 racing into an enjoyable unlicensed arcade racing game, the framerate, dynamic resolution, and color hue issues make this a port to avoid if you have the option to play on more powerful platforms. Nothing suggests why a Switch port should be so difficult to pull off with its cartoonish, Micro Machines-like look, but the conclusion is that 3DClouds, or the party responsible for the port, has failed to do so.
