Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends Review Round-up
[Reviews are subjective. That's why reading more than one is important when deciding to pursue a game. In this new feature, we save you the time and synthesize leading website reviews with the newest racing releases.]
Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends was developed by Slightly Mad Studios, Published by Atari, created for PS3, Xbox 360, and currently retails for $49.99. The game has a standard single player campaign, online multiplayer modes, 36 circuits, and 50+ cars that highlight over 80 years of Ferrari history.
Andrew Hayward at Official Xbox Magazine depicts “awkward looking crashes” in a career mode that plays like a tedious, “mediocre history textbook” with “the same generic tracks over and over again across eras, and at times, only the car or event type will change between subsequent events.”
With regards to controls Hayward felt “spinouts are far too common here on even basic turns thanks to squirrely handling. Worse yet, even the lightest nudge from another vehicle often triggers a wild spin or elaborate series of flips, which looks incredibly awkward given how inert and undamaged the cars appear in motion. Even interactions with fences and hay bales seem laughably unrealistic. Moreover, the game inconsistently awards off-track penalties, which can be unbelievably frustrating.”
Game Informer’s Matthew Kato echoes control issues. “The non-adjustable steering controls lead to too much oversteer, making it hard to make small steering adjustments without the backend getting loose. This could be related to the fact that cars feel like they turn on a swivel.” He adds, “contact physics can spin you out really easy.”
On a positive note, Kato applauds the Ferrari car models and Hayward applauds the fact that “open-air cars even simulate the helmet visor’s tint in first-person.”
IGN’s Nathan Meunier reviews the handling in a more positive light, saying the cars “are generally responsive and handle well at high speed… [T]hree adjustable driving model presets let you tweak the overall physics and realism level to suit your skill.”
Meunier is satisfied with the casual presets, but feels the pro mode “doesn’t quite crank all of the realism dials to 11 like in some other racing sims, yet it does make it tricky enough to put veteran gear-heads through their paces.”
Gone is the open-world campaign of Test Drive Unlimited, describes Meunier, filled with “a minimalist story that plays out almost entirely through informative but unexciting menu text… but widely ranging objectives save the day.” Ultimately, the main mode suffers from “[a]sinine difficulty spikes,” though.
Thomas Eder of German site Video Games Zone rates the game positively over all with a 78 out of 100. Eder says the game is great for race fans and has hot engine sounds, but it also has inconsistent driving physics, bad menus, and unbalanced difficulty.
Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends sits with a Metacritic of 63 out of 100, with four websites reporting.
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