My feedback after 20 hours of playing

I struggled through 4 hours of the trial and aside from more content as well as the current gen visuals the only noteable positive steps I saw over Grid 19 were the online multiplayer improvements.

Career mode (yet again) generally involves doing 1-3 near identical events, then moving onto another 1-3 near identical events (etc etc) and lacks the continuity or depth of 'proper' full on career style championships seen in other games. Racecraft still gives a greater reward for driving badly with assists on than it does driving a controlled race from the front, thus defeating the whole point of calling it "Racecraft". Handling is far from perfect either as an arcade or simcade racer. There are some very noticeable framerate drops on XSX. Vehicle content is spread very thinly across the various classes.

Legends, like Grid 19 and Dirt 5 is your typical 'won and done' racing game (you will rarely, if ever revisit completed events) - which is fine for those who spend their time collecting achievements before moving onto the next game but doesn't attract the same levels of enthusiasm by those who remember putting hundreds upon hundreds of hours into Toca 1+2 or Racedriver Grid...or more importantly those who still remember *why* they dedicated so many hours into those games.

Where Dirt Rally 2 is concerned (looking beyond from the shady DLC practices) I applaud Codemasters for successfully recapturing the CMR days but sadly I personally can't say the same regarding Grid Legend when comparing it against Toca and Grid 1.... 

"Racing game of 2022"? If we lived in a parallel universe where GT7, the tbc Forza Motorsport, the tbc Indycar 22, the tbc Touring Cars championship (BTCC), the tbc Assetto Corsa 2, the tbc Dakar 22, WRC 22, and the tbc NASCAR Ignition 22 (amongst potentially many others) didn't exist then yeah, it might well be.... 

Imho:

Complaining about the variety of missions in a racing game is stupid. I mean, what would you want to do other than escaping police (nfs) and winning a race?

It's normal. What I liked about the grid story is that you feel the pressure. In some points there are scripted incidents (for example, in one of the first Elimination races, Yume loses a tire and you have to win alone) that help "varying" the missions. Also, it develops characters a lot (i won't spoil)

Driving handling: what's the matter? It's not the most sim experience ever but... I'm enjoying it without HUD and without any help. It can be very hard.. Grid and Toca have never been 100% sim.. I think they are coherent. 

Hours spent in the game... 

Maybe yes maybe no. In ToCA 2 you had ALL the vehicles usable in the career, but well.. once you finish, you unlock them for free racing. In Grid, you don't use every car, either in Story or Career. There are even more cars that need to be unlocked (completing races or buying them).. And every car has 3 levels of upgrade. To upgrade one stage of one car you need to drive a number of Kilometers.. Basically two races sometimes. This ends up taking more than half an hour to unlock THE POSSIBILITY TO UPGRADE through all the three stages. 

About Forza Horizon 5 etc... Yeah, yeah. GT7 is the only one who can beat Grid.. But don't forget Grid has crossplay.

Of course it's my opinion, and yours is yours.. I respect that. As I said, I just hope they keep up with the content 

At the core the game is fun. I haven't played Grid 2019 but I think the handling model is decent enough for a casual controller racer. BUT the game is absolutely filled with bugs. I cannot fathom how you have played 20 hours and did not encounter bugs. Team name doesn't update on pre race screens, the "continuing in:" counter after race doesn't do anything, every now and the the game thinks all my unlocks (cars and events) are somehow new again, trophies not unlocking, completed sponsorships are gone, somehow I have only completed 75% of the challenges category in Rookie even though all are completed with gold trophy. 

All can be fixed with patches but things like this clearly have not gone through QA. Only way this gets an award is if GT7 falls flat on it's face and no other racing game releases this year.

I swear, I encountered no bugs at all.. I'm surprised too

 It's funny really because this morning I was mulling over what I wrote and thinking maybe I was still having a bit of a Grid 19 hangover and was being overly harsh...until I happened to stumble upon a 2 hour Jimmy Broadbent video asking the "is this game any good?" question. The stream was fine and covered a lot of gameplay footage but the one telling point for me was during the analysis period at the end of the video when he echoed my sentiments by not only mentioning how disconnected Legends had become from the original but more importantly how, after only a couple of hours, he felt he had had enough of the game.

I was looking thru your reply and much as I respect your opinions I do think you're overlooking one very important point. Toca 2 didn't have much content, didn't have a suite of upgrades or pointless trinket unlocks and didn't have an 'immersive' story mode......because it didn't need any of them. It's strengths were in it's gameplay and nothing else. But yeah, if shallow, throwaway racing games are your thing then that's great, by all means play and enjoy Grid Legends. I'm more than happy to skip the game and wait for something with a little more depth.