games: Racedriver: Grid

Today we’re looking under the hood of Codemaster’s latest outing, RaceDriver: GRID. Based on the same engine as DiRT, but claiming to be focused strongly on the thrill of on-the-track racing, it is definitely an exciting prospect.

So does it live up to our high expectations? In a word, yes! This slick and good-looking game has a hell of a lot going for it.

But first a word of warning for the racing neophyte, this is pretty intimidating stuff and you’re instantly thrown in at the deep end. Once you enter your name you’re all of a sudden on a racetrack in the powerful Dodge Viper. You don’t need to place, just finish the race to earn your rookie license, which is a good thing too as the standards are tough right from the get go. But this straight in and drive attitude is what characterizes this game, and once you’ve pushed through that steep learning curve, you’ll be grateful for it.

The career mode is simple. Once you have your rookie license, you start out taking driver offers for other teams to raise the money to get your own team entered in races. You will need to build cash levels to develop your team, and earn reputation points to get higher licenses. You can boost the rep you get for each race by driving at harder difficulty levels or gambling away your flashbacks.

Flashbacks you say? Yes flashbacks - this is the most innovative addition to GRID, and a damn useful one too. If you write off your car you get three options: retire, resign or instant replay. Rewind the camera and resume the race a few seconds before your crash, to correct your mistake and continue the race. Now you can’t use flashbacks on the pro races and using them does cost you in cash bonuses, but it’s a welcome lifeline at the end of a long race. And just knowing you can fall back on it can encourage a more aggressive attitude on the track, which is what this game’s all about.

GRID has captured a fantastic atmosphere of balls-to–the-wall, on-track excitement. The AI is damn tough, and for the non-seasoned driver even on basic, the tracks will probably feel quite lonely at first as you are left breathing your competitors dust But once you catch up, you will see how intelligently it has been programmed, with different drivers having different styles, and even varying their responses to situations if you restart a race, keeping things dynamic. The dense and responsive crowd will gasp when you crash, and boo or cheer you, and the audio is well designed with suitably pumped music when races end and all the right squeals and roars throughout. The cars are very responsive, and have a great damage system, which will hamper your control if you really prang it. And you can really feel the difference between surface textures, even on the PS3 with a sixaxis.

As well as career, you also have the race day mode which lets you loose on X different disciplines. The standards are all there, but so are some more interesting things like Pro and midnight Togue, Various Drift Championships and Demolition Derby which provides a hell of a lot of variety in 1 package.

So, downsides? Well, while this is a challenging game and quite realistic in places, it is not a simulator, which is good or bad depending on your tastes. Its focus also means that off-track elements are on the light side, with no car tuning, and limited livery customization compared to something like Forza. The garage has 45 cars, which might not seem like many, but they have been very well chosen.

The biggest gripe though is that in spite of the top quality video functions used for the replay and flashback features, you can’t upload or even save your videos. A pretty big oversight, especially as the online game for up to 12 competitors is looking pretty tight and should see a strong community building. Sadly there is no local multiplayer without setting up a system link.

So in conclusion, Racedriver GRID is an exciting and addictive racer with very few downsides. I give it 4 stars.

For the best of the rest:

Euro Gamer:
Pausing and restarting is such an integral part of games like PGR and GRID, where you want to begin every race perfectly, that it surely can’t be long before someone binds it to a button, just as the time trial festishists who make TrackMania have done on the PC. But having perfected the start, what do you then do when you try and vault the chicane at 150mph on the last lap only to end up in a tyre wall? Traditionally, you shout and scream. In GRID’s case, though, you just hit a button, rewind your mistake and try again.

Trusted Reviews:
The perennial underdog of the driving game world, Codemasters’ TOCA series won and kept a hardcore fanbase, but never quite achieved the global recognition that the likes of Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing have enjoyed. This is a shame. The last effort, TOCA Race Driver 3, had its visual issues but offered one of the most authentic and exciting racing experiences on the last generation of consoles. Race Driver: GRID may have left the TOCA name behind, but it’s still full of the same qualities and - importantly - the same attitude that drove its antecedents. I just hope it leaves the ‘underdog’ reputation behind, because GRID deserves to be big. It’s not just comparable to the likes of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Forza 2 and Project Gotham Racing 4 - it’s actually a better game in some respects.


Video Gamer:
Codemasters is well known as one of the leaders in the racing game market, but with the PGR, Forza and Gran Turismo series all leading the way the UK-based publisher needed Race Driver: GRID to be something special. With the most impressive visuals ever to grace a racing game, brilliant variety and game-making rewind feature GRID is everything we wanted it to be and quite possibly the racing game of 2008.