The Grand Tour Game


The Grand Tour Game is an episodic racing video game developed and published by Heavy Iron Studios and Amazon Game Studios for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is based on the Amazon Prime series The Grand Tour. It covers the first episode of Series 1 and Series 2 and released a new episode of the game simultaneously with each episode of Series 3. This is Amazon's first video game for the two consoles.
The game was first announced on 21 August 2018 by Amazon and later on DriveTribe, and over the coming months, several trailers were released. The game was launched on 15 January 2019, three days before the third season was due to start on Amazon Prime.
Upon release, The Grand Tour Game received moderate reviews from critics, with praise for the vehicles featured, location present, being appealing to fans of the show, gadgets available to use and the transitions between episodes and gameplay, but criticism for the basic challenges and driving controls. Despite this, fans of the show have given more positive feedback towards the game.
In June 2020, the game was delisted from the PlayStation Store, Xbox Games Store and Amazon.

Gameplay

The game allows the player to experience an episode of The Grand Tour, but some sections of the program are replaced with 'Scenes', challenges which the player completes. The aim of the game is to collect medals from the Scenes, awarded based on the performance of the player. These rewards, from best to worst, are the Gold Medal, Silver Medal, Bronze Medal and The 'Toilet Flush', if the game deems the performance particularly poor. Scenes usually involve driving the cars which appear in The Grand Tour's episodes, in doing various challenges. However, some challenges involve taking a photo, completing a puzzle, or in the episode ‘Pick Up Put Downs’ the player can control a certain gun. Most episodes have between 14 and 15 Scenes, although this varies dramatically for some episodes.
Most Scenes are similar to what happens in their respective episodes, although some Scenes have been altered or omitted due to licensing restrictions. For example, the segments from Series 3, Episode 10, where James May drives the Toyota Yaris GRMN, or when Jeremy Clarkson drives the McLaren Senna are not available in the game. The game features voice-overs from the presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, as well as from professional driver Abbie Eaton. Alongside the single-player mode, the game also has a local multiplayer split-screen mode where 1-4 people can race with cars of their choice on the various tracks in the game.

Episodes

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Reception

On the review website Metacritic, the game was awarded a score of 52/100 for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Metacritic user reviews for the PS4 were labelled as “mixed or average reviews” with a rating of 5.8/10, based on 13 reviews, but user reviews on the same website for the Xbox One were labelled as “generally favourable reviews” with a rating of 8.0/10, based on 7 reviews.
Martyn Stanley of DriveTribe gave the game four stars out of five, commenting that “merged media is a really interesting idea.”