WHAT’S NEW PLUS-SY CAT?
Digging into the random acts of gaming a lengthy PS Plus subscription offers
May’s PS Plus lineup made you scream if you wanted to go faster. There was car racing in Grid Legends, speedy bicycles in Descenders, and you booking it away from sword-wielding enemies in Chivalry 2 lest they dismember you and really make you holler.
Grid Legends pulled up to whisk us away, though. As ever, there’s much to love about good ol’ Codies’ racing chops no matter which gear the studio chooses to shift to – here, it’s all about track racing. And this revival of the Grid series is another winner.
Released shortly after the iconic British dev was bought up by big EA, it flexed the bigger budget muscles of its new family in its story mode. That’s not a feature you can always expect to find in a racer, and even when it’s there we’d rarely expect it to be good, but this one manages to charm us.
Motorsport rivalries are told through FMV – including a standout performance from Ncuti Gatwa (now poised to take over as the latest regeneration of Doctor Who). Documentary-style, it adds drama and stakes
to the action on the track, and provides ample excuse for you to bounce between different events and behind the wheels of tantalising new rides.
That penchant for portraying the off-track drama also comes through in races thanks to a Nemesis system that means AI can go all HAL 9000 on you if you start to tick other racers off by going bumper-to-bumper with them too many times.
Beyond the drama, there’s not much to surprise you, solid though the racing bells and whistles may be. But it’s a testament to how much paying attention to those little extra elements can add. Years on, those rivalries will stick with us, and the story may lure us back for a second visit.
Like any gearheads,
Codies understands the love of the soapy tiffs.