Formula Legends

My first thought booting Formula Legends was that somebody at 3DClouds had a poster of Ayrton Senna on their wall and decided to build an entire game around that feeling. The cartoonish, super-deformed art style throws you at first - these bobble-headed drivers in squished open-wheelers look like they belong on a novelty keychain - but the moment you drop into a wet qualifying lap in something resembling a late-60s car, you realise the visuals are a deliberate disguise. This is a simcade racer that will humble you if you treat it like a kart game. The structure is generous for the price point. A Story Mode walks you through every notable era from the 1960s to the mid-2020s, with 16 car models each handling distinctly as the sport's technology evolved - the mechanical-grip, snap-oversteer monsters of the golden era feel nothing like the planted, aerodynamically sophisticated machines from the 2000s onward. Fourteen circuits inspired by real venues round things out: Riviera Streets is unmistakably Monaco with its famous hairpin, while the Temple of Speed wears its Monza influence openly. None are one-to-one recreations, which keeps the lawyers happy and, honestly, makes the tracks feel a bit tighter and more fun to attack. Beyond Story Mode you get Time Trials and a Custom Race builder where you can mix any era of car and circuit into your own championship. The variables stack up nicely: tyre compounds, fuel consumption, variable weather that actually changes your racing line, and pit stops managed through a button-press mini-game that costs you real seconds if you fumble it. Here is where I have to be straight with you, especially if you are coming from the sports-and-racing angle I cover. There is no local multiplayer and there is no split-screen. For a game this charming and this accessible in premise, that absence stings. A four-person couch session with 60s-era wonky open-wheelers sounds like an absolute riot, and right now you cannot have it. Online multiplayer has been in closed beta testing as of mid-2026, so it is on the way, but it is not live for general players yet. The controller situation at launch also drew criticism - analogue stick steering felt overweighted and sluggish - though post-launch patches reworked the handling system and added an alternative steering mode, which most players found to be a significant improvement. Difficulty balance remains a mild headache: easy is genuinely too forgiving, while normal can feel punishing before you have internalised the braking points. A very-easy option was added in a later patch, which helps. On the hardware side, steering wheel support on PC received improved input remapping in later updates, with full console wheel support still rolling out. If you play on a gamepad, spend a few minutes in the settings finding the right sensitivity curve before judging the handling - raw defaults are not optimal on all controllers. The absence of a cockpit camera view is worth flagging too: you get third-person and a close-follow behind-the-driver perspective, which is fine, but wheel users will miss that first-person immersion. For the rest of us on a standard pad, the behind-car view is clean and readable, especially in rain. The art style, with its vivid colours and era-appropriate sepia tones in the early decades, carries a lot of charm that keeps races from feeling repetitive even without a licence. Byron Renna and Jack Stewie are not Senna and Stewart, but you know exactly who they are meant to be, and that wink-and-nod approach runs through the whole game and makes it genuinely fun to unlock each era. Formula Legends is a solo racer right now, built for F1 fans who want to hop between decades without the weight of a full simulation. The developer has been active with patches and free content drops - including new teams and drivers added at no cost in update 1.6 - which suggests this is a game that will keep improving. It is not the title I would pull out for a Saturday night group session yet, but for a quiet evening working through era championships and finally nailing that pit-stop timing, it scratches a very specific itch that nothing else quite covers. Riley, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 10 ProtonDB community reports.

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