Adventures in Mac Gaming, Volume One
In which GRID Legends is put through the paces
Disclosure of tech specs: Played on a base M4 Mac mini, with a 1080p monitor
Mac gaming is kind of like a treasure hunt in that there are lots of games on the platform, but at the same time, there’s so many left behind in Windowsland. It’s been made even worse after Apple transitioned macOS to 64-bit, as you might see in a trip through Steam, where hordes of games are locked behind a message stating they work on 32-bit installations only. Valve recently updated the Steam platform itself to be a 64-bit app, but their games? Unfortunately, classic franchises like Portal and Half-Life are locked away, unplayable on top-of-the-line Apple Silicon computers at this time.
Insert moment of sadness here.
Apple seems to be trying to do something about gaming on their computer hardware, though they’re notorious for repeated starts and stops in this sector. This go-around, they have worked with big publishers like Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, and 505 Games to release some notable games, exclusively on the Mac App Store. These titles have included Capcom’s recent Resident Evil remakes, Remedy’s Control, Kojima’s Death Stranding, and Ubi’s Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, for starters. Aside from Assassin’s Creed, these games aren’t the latest and greatest, but they’re high-quality titles that could appeal to Mac-only players who also don’t own a gaming console. I’m assuming this specific group exists?
This episode of my adventures in Mac gaming takes me to the EA / Codemasters joint, GRID Legends. A lot of Codemasters games have been ported to Mac in the past - I’ve got Dirt 4, Dirt Rally, and GRID Autosport in my Mac Steam library, for starters - but now that they’re an EA property, those releases have effectively ended. For instance, the previous GRID game, which was called, uh, GRID, was not released on Mac, the first time the franchise skipped the platform. Anyway, Apple made a deal with EA, and Porting Developer Extraordinaire Feral Interactive have provided an excellent conversion of the game for Mac users, at a nice price of $40 at release.
GRID Legends does allow me to touch on one of the more frustrating aspects of this relationship with the App Store. Some of the games I mentioned above come with broad GameCenter support, specifically achievements and iCloud enabled saves. The Resident Evil games for instance actually save to its own folder in my iCloud so I can carry them over from my iMac, MacBook Air, and Mac mini and pick up wherever I left off. It’s all very Steamy. GRID Legends, however, doesn’t have either one of these features. The in-game launcher from Feral gives out the same achievements you could get from the PC or console release of the game, but your save isn’t uploaded to any cloud, so you’d have to find it in your Mac directory, copy to either a USB stick or iCloud, and carry it over. It’s doable, but still a very unfortunate omission.
The game itself, of course, is very high quality, and feature packed. Mostly. It has a full single-player story campaign that tells a (cheesy) story of an up-and-coming racing team via races and full-motion video cutscenes, along with a series of mini stories that were added during the life of the game before the Mac release, similarly to the extra events added to Dirt 5 over its life (another Codies game that skipped ye olde Macintosh). It also has a more traditional single-player mode competing in events, upgrading vehicles, and whatnot. There’s also some weekly events to participate in once all the remaining content is exhausted. What it’s missing, surprisingly, is the multiplayer mode that’s in all other versions of the game. As someone who doesn’t much partake in online gaming I barely noticed this omission, but if you do enjoy that, be warned that it’s kinda not there. At all.
The important thing is that this Mac version of GRID Legends runs great! Granted, I used my brand new M4 Mac to play it, but even on my sad little 1080p monitor, it looks spectacular at 60FPS and doesn’t have any skips or frame drops. I uploaded one of the above screenshots of rain because it really hits that “great art style” point that is just really pleasing to look at even when racing around a city or track. Everything looks smooth and polished and is a really great demonstration of what can be accomplished if someone actually took the time to port games to Macintosh. It makes for a great proof of concept.
I should have put this up top, but as I close this piece out, keep in mind these won’t be full-fledged reviews of the games I mention, mostly because they’re old now and it would be like the 1001st voice where 1000 have already spoken. Instead, they’ll come from a specific avenue of seeing how they play and measure up on Mac and its vaunted Apple Silicon architecture, along with any features (or lack thereof) to point out. It won’t be kept to just games on the App Store, instead I will probably post here and there about playable Mac games on Steam that I found and want to talk about, be it a rundown of a game, a series of complaints, or just want to post pretty screenshots. If you’re into that, cool, you’re in the right place. Thanks for reading.
