From the makers of Paw Patrol Grand Prix and Gigantosaurus: Dino Kart, comes… Formula Legends, an off-brand, Formula One-inspired arcade racer. Yes, it’s certainly true that developer 3DClouds’ primary output appears to be racing games aimed at an extremely young audience so, on paper, Formula Legends might sound easy to cruise on past for those of you who are no longer eating spaghetti with your hands. However, if you’re a fan of the long and storied history of Formula 1 racing – as well as games like Art of Rally, Circuit Superstars, and Micro Machines – Formula Legends might prove to be a dark horse in the race. This colourful, toy-like arcade racer consistently impresses thanks to its charming and evolving approach to showcasing the many, many eras it represents, although the fun is punctured somewhat by a slightly laggy handling model, some annoyingly uneven AI, and its lack of multiplayer.
In case it’s not obvious by its chunky car caricatures and cartoon-adjacent art style, Formula Legends is not here to compete against the likes of Codemasters’ modern F1 series. Those games are mostly for hardcore fans who crave a realistic approach, but also tweakable enough to remain approachable for newcomers and younger players – indeed, that’s one of their real strengths. But where F1 2025 is seeking to be a credible simulation of a current elite sport, like its peers on the football pitch or basketball court, Formula Legends is still very serious about faithfully paying homage to the sport of F1 in a delightfully comprehensive way that older fans can appreciate.
Through Goes Hammerton
Taking a greatest hits-style approach to the history of the world’s premier, open-wheel motorsport, Formula Legends boasts a career mode that covers seven decades – stretching all the way back to the ’60s. On top of this, most of these decades are broken up into multiple mini-eras covering the early, mid, and late phases of these periods. The car models, drivers, and the teams they race for are constantly shaken up across each championship. Many of these championships are locked until you complete the one prior to it, but there are entry points in each decade. This feels like a good balance between giving us plenty to unlock, but also the flexibility to hop around the different eras as we choose. You won’t have to chronologically move all the way from the late ’60s to today – through 70-odd years of racing – just to unlock Formula Legends’ most modern car and driver combinations. You can do a vintage championship, head into the 2020s, and then jump back to the ’90s if you want to. All the while you’ll be unlocking new content. It’s all very well considered.
We ought to note that Formula Legends is completely unaffiliated with real-life F1, so there are no licensed cars or driver names. This kind of thing comes with its own sort of charm, however: Not only does it remind me of the equally unlicensed sports games full of cheeky soundalikes I played in my youth, but part of the fun for me has been discovering the silly aliases 3DClouds has cooked up for its huge timeline of teams and drivers. This means being introduced to the likes of Osvald Pastry, Charlie Lacreme, and Luis Hammerton, and also past drivers like Dave Coulthsoft, Marvin Brubble, and Mike and Malf Shoemaker. Some of them stretch the bounds of a good pun to the point of being a bit too obtuse or confusing – and it could’ve done with one more edit pass from the development team to catch quirks like Alan Jones… I mean, Al John inexplicably migrating from Australia to New Zealand in the 1980s – but it’s cute stuff overall.
The cars look great, and I like how their squat frames and exaggerated features make them look like the sort of Micro Machines I would’ve climbed over every kid in my class for back in the late ’80s. They sound great too, thanks to the fact that Formula Legends’ engine sounds profoundly change for each era. Well, they don’t all sound great, because the real modern F1 is limp and wheezy compared to the primal screaming present in the age of V10s – but that’s not 3DClouds’ fault. Actually, there’s currently a sound bug that causes the engine noise for the modern cars to sometimes drop out for extended periods. It’s a fault I’m sure 3DClouds will seek to fix as soon as feasible, but it’s probably an indictment on today’s V6 turbo-hybrids that I didn’t really miss hearing them that much.
Spanning so many eras of racing has also compelled 3DClouds to get clever with how it handles the vast differences between old-school racing tracks and their dramatically refurbished incarnations. For this, many tracks have up to three different versions: vintage, classic, and modern. As with the drivers and cars, the tracks are unlicensed – but they each contain enough recognisable nods to famous corners and track segments that there’s no question which ones they’re homages to.
I really enjoy how tailored the tracks are to each era. Vintage tracks make liberal use of hay bales as their one and only concession to driver safety, and they’re largely surrounded by quaint countryside, while their modern versions are lined with curbs and wrap around areas that have since become huge, built-up racing precincts. Better yet, while some tracks evolve upon a single recognisable layout – like the circuits for Belgium or Italy (which riff on Spa and Monza, respectively) – others find themselves totally reinvented.
The vintage German circuit is an extensively long track that winds through a forest, mimicking the full Nürburgring Nordschleife that F1 cars used to race on, but the classic and modern German track is a shorter and more conventional GP circuit. Similarly, the classic Australian track has a clearly different layout and aesthetic to the modern track, mirroring the real-world differences between the Adelaide street circuit of the late ’80s/early ’90s and the current circuit in Melbourne’s Albert Park. It’s this kind of attention to detail that tells me that this is not being phoned in. There are even optional visual filters that give vintage races a warmer, old-school film tone and classic races a bright, CRT TV effect to better situate them in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s a really well-curated and crafted career mode, and you can tell the team are firm F1 fans from the commitment to these small details that’s on display.
Turn Around
The disappointing part of Formula Legends is that it doesn’t always hold up out on track. There are some circuits where I’m able to get into a pretty good groove – particularly after several laps of the layout to learn the corners. However, there are a few too many other occasions where it’s difficult to find the right rhythm without yawing side to side trying to correct my line coming out of corners. I think the reason behind this is that there’s some odd lag in the steering – like it’s not responsive enough. It makes rapid changes of direction, like chicanes, quite frustrating at times. The change of angle coming a fraction late does take some getting used to. A bit more sharpness to those controls would have been preferable.
I like playing Formula Legends from its most distant camera setting (a cockpit camera is included, but it wasn’t my preferred view) because that’s where it reminds me most of Art of Rally (and where I feel it’s at its best; a more top-down view takes the edge off the numbness in the handling model). The difference is, Art of Rally doesn’t have a gaggle of other AI cars to contend with – and it’s Formula Legends’ AI cars that are one of its key weaknesses.
It’s quite annoying how impactful even minor contact with your AI opponents can be. Essentially, any scrape with a car on the outside of you during a corner will completely overrule your steering, causing you to understeer directly into a wall or off track, and even a light touch from behind will cause other cars to immediately slow down dramatically and trap you behind them.
The inconsistent AI, which comes in just three settings (easy, normal, and hard) is a significant bugbear, especially since there’s no multiplayer mode in which to race against friends. The main problem is how much their proficiency varies between circuits. On a lot of tracks I found it entirely straightforward to keep the normal AI behind me throughout a race, sometimes pulling out to quite large leads. However, on some tracks (especially Formula Legends’ version of Monaco) they’re supernaturally quicker for no apparent reason. That should be no problem because you can just turn down the difficulty for those tracks, right? Unfortunately not: the difficulty level can’t be adjusted between races during a championship – once it’s set, it’s set for all subsequent races.
Formula Legends would be much improved with an AI system we’re able to adjust with a bit more granularity. Something like that could help keep the pack closer together, particularly since tyre wear, dynamic weather, and pit stops are all factors in Formula Legends’ racing. Having to think about your pit stop strategy throughout a race is a nice touch, but making those snap decisions to pit (or stay out for one more lap) would be a lot more tense if we could find a way to bring the racing closer on a more regular basis.
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