A retro-themed drive through the history of Formula One comes under the microscope from a reader who appreciates the entirely unofficial approach to the subject matter.

I want to start this review off by acknowledging and thanking the developer, 3D Clouds, for sending me a code for this game in response to my Inbox letter about the game, and to GC for passing it on.

For the uninitiated, Formula Legends is an unlicensed, stylised, arcade-like blast through the decades of the top series of single seater motorsport. You want to race as Luis Hammerton in a Merkseds or Mike Shoemaker in a Ferenzo through the Riviera Streets GP? You got it. In fact, all your faux favourites (faux-vorites?) are here, complete with liveries, helmets, and circuits that are just off-brand enough to avoid a lawsuit. Drivers, teams and tracks are unlocked through various milestones you have to complete through the story mode, like driving a certain distance or winning a certain number of races with specific cars.

Visually, the cars themselves have been squashed up a bit, and tyres and the drivers' helmets are humorously oversized. The whole game looks really nice, and this extends to the rain, which is dynamic. Races can start wet or dry and finish the other way round, with splashes on the camera very quickly followed by puddles and then fully wet surfaces, with an appropriate amount of spray being kicked up by both your car and those of your opponents. When it's really heavy, your visibility is seriously hampered by all the water, reflecting how hard it must be to race in those conditions in real life.

This, of course, means that tyre changes and pit stops are here and present. Tyres degrade over the course of a race, with significant performance dips at 50% and then 25%. This makes strategy pretty one-dimensional, as you can easily get to the halfway point with 50% tyre life left, making the only strategy call you have to make whether to stop on lap five or six in an 11-lap race. There's also era-dependent fuel consumption, but as there's no option to change your starting fuel load, at most you only ever need a 10% top-up at your lone mid-race pitstop.

Most of the enjoyment I get from this game is from its journey through history. I started watching F1 in 1995, and I was delighted to see that the mid-90s is the midpoint of the story mode, with most decades split into Early, Mid and Late championships. Engine sounds change with the times, from the turbos of the 80s, screaming V10s in the 90s, to that awful sound the V6 turbo hybrids make in the present day. Just turn the music off so you can appreciate it all.

As well as the cars, the presentation and tracks evolve through the decades, with races in the Late 60s being bathed in a lovely sepia tone, and tracks that start off being lined with grass and hay bales are upgraded with kerbs, barriers, gravel traps and eventually tarmac run-offs in the modern era.

This evolution extends to some of the track layouts as well, the most obvious being the change from the Nordschleife stand-in, the Dark Forest GP, to its modern day, sanitised, far shorter counterpart. One very minor criticism I have at this stage is that this evolution doesn't seem to start to happen until the late 80s, when in real-life Niki Lauda's fiery crash in 1976 was the catalyst for major changes in the name of safety. But this is a very minor niggle - far more serious problems are the handling and the AI.

I can't sugarcoat this: the handling is bad. There is a noticeable delay between you moving the stick and the car responding, and another delay between you stopping steering and the car straightening up. Then, to add to this, if you're on a long corner where you might be holding the stick for a slightly longer duration, the tyres will suddenly bite and give you incredible grip, veering you into the barrier on the inside of the corner or across the grass, earning you an instant warning for track limits - more than three and you get one second added to your race time for each subsequent infringement.

This lag also makes it nigh on impossible to catch a spin, as even if you have superhuman reflexes the chances of you turning into the spin early enough to beat the laggy response are slim.

Having said all of that, by around my third championship, I'd gotten used to turning in and straightening up a good chunk of a second before I need to, and while I still get caught out sometimes by the mid-corner bite, I'm generally keeping it on the racing line - fuel consumption is reduced and tyre life increased the more you stick to it - and holding my own against the AI, which is the next problem.

CPU opposition are the worst kind of on-the-rails tanks that you get even in high-budget racers. It doesn't matter if you hit them or they hit you (which they do, a lot), you're the one that's going to be shoved off track or pitched into a spin. I tend to try and hang back at corners, get a better exit and do my overtaking on the straights, so there's less risk of being punted out of contention. They do make mistakes, but hilarious ones like getting stuck on a barrier on the inside of a corner and causing a multi-car pile-up in the process.

There's also an odd mismatch between their qualifying and race pace. I found that, even on Easy, I was qualifying near the back in most races, yet blasting past everyone by the end of lap two in the race, to the point that I very quickly simply didn't bother to qualify at all.

To its credit, 3D Clouds have acknowledged both of these issues (amongst others) and said that their first patch, scheduled for the end of this week, will begin to address them. Obviously, I can't speak for the success (or not) of this patch, but it's encouraging that they're listening to feedback and working to improve from the outset.

I want to absolutely love this game, because it's clear the developers love the sport as much as I do, if not more. I hope the early patches sort out the main issues, as you could easily add a point each to the final score for decent handling and improved opposition. As it stands, it's a great looking and sounding game, and generous trip through the decades of the pinnacle of motorsport, but it's let down by the actual racing.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5

Price: £19.99

Publisher: 3DClouds

Developer: 3DClouds

Release Date: 18th September 2025

Age Rating: 3

Formula Legends reader review - Reader's Feature