GRID™ Legends: Deluxe Edition

My Experience with GRID™ Legends: Deluxe Edition

My friend kept raving about this racing game on his phone, so I finally caved and bought it about a year ago. I was super hesitant to spend over $13 on a mobile game—that’s like, three decent coffees. But I was so tired of free games that are basically just ads with some gameplay sprinkled in. I play on my Samsung Galaxy S23, and honestly, it’s the only game that’s stayed on my phone this long. I remember one Tuesday night last semester, I was supposed to be reading for a class, but I ended up spending a full hour just doing time trials on the Barcelona track. The graphics and the feeling of the cars are so good that it completely pulled me in. It doesn’t feel like a cheap mobile port; it feels like a proper racing game that just happens to be on my phone.

Features Worth Noting

The biggest thing for me is that you just pay once. No battle passes, no loot boxes, no ads popping up after every race. The Deluxe Edition gives you a bunch of cars right from the start, which was awesome because I could jump into different race types without grinding for weeks. The Nemesis system is cool too. There’s this one AI driver, Zhang, who became my arch-rival after he spun me out twice in a row. The game started giving me special goals to beat him, which made the career mode way more personal and fun. The weather effects are insane. Racing in the rain on the San Francisco track actually changes how you drive—you can feel the car slide, and the windshield gets all blurry. It’s a level of detail I never expected from a phone game.

What Needs Work

The touch controls took some real getting used to. Out of the box, the steering was too sensitive for me. I had to dig into the settings and spend a good ten minutes tweaking the sensitivity and button layout before it felt right. Even now, on really tight tracks like Brands Hatch, I sometimes mess up a corner because my thumb slips. I also wish there was a bit more to do in terms of customizing your cars visually. You can upgrade performance, which is great, but changing how your car looks is pretty limited. For a premium game, a more robust livery editor would have been a nice touch.

Pricing

Let’s be real, $13.49 stings a little when you see it on the Play Store. Most of my games are free. But after a year of playing, I can say it’s the opposite of those free games. You pay once and you’re done. I’ve probably gotten hundreds of hours of entertainment from it, which works out to pennies per hour. Compared to buying a $60 console game, which I can’t afford, this was a way to get a similar quality experience. It respects your time and your wallet, which is rare. For me, the price was justified because it eliminated all the annoying monetization tactics I hate.

Developer Notes

I had one issue where my progress didn’t sync properly after I got a new phone. I emailed Feral Interactive’s support on a weekend, not really expecting much. They got back to me after a few days—it wasn’t instant, but the reply was helpful and clearly written by a person, not a bot. They walked me through how to fix the cloud save issue. They’ve also dropped a few updates since I bought it, adding a new track and tweaking some cars. It’s nice to see they haven’t just taken the money and run. It feels like they care about the game, which makes me more confident in recommending it.

Security & Privacy

I’m always a bit wary about what apps are doing in the background. GRID Legends seems pretty clean. It asks for pretty basic permissions, mostly for saving your game progress to the cloud and for online features if you play multiplayer. I haven’t noticed any weird battery drain or data usage spikes while playing. The privacy policy is standard for a game—it talks about collecting gameplay data for analytics, but there’s no personal info being harvested. It feels like a straightforward, single-player focused experience that isn’t trying to mine your data, which is a relief.