Race Driver GRID

After playing many disappointing racing games in recent times (Need For Speed: ProStreet, Burnout Paradise to name a few) I was pretty put off with the whole genre and didn’t expect Race Driver GRID to change that. So when the time came, I didn’t want to waste a large chunk of my time reviewing another disappointing racer that would prod the decaying carcass of the genre. Well I did so anyway, and now that I’ve spent a whole lot of time with GRID, I’m having a really tough time keeping myself from it!

GRID takes all the stuff that you hate about racing games and dumps them right out of the window. The game is fueled by an extremely well balanced concoction of the best of arcade racers and race simulators that work simultaneously to deliver a truly superb racing experience. The most important aspect – car control – has been nailed and will appeal to most ardent arcade racing fans, as well as all those who love their game as authentic as possible. Stock cars, Super cars, Derby cars, Muscle cars – each and every ride controls differently yet beautifully in their own way, so mastering them is not only a challenge but is fun as hell!

The factor that set GRID apart from other racers right from its conceptualization was the ‘flashback’ feature. This game mechanic allows you to rewind time (much like Prince of Persia – Sands of Time) in case you make a horrid turn and total your car. When I first heard of it, this mechanic sounded like a complete gimmick and a desperate attempt on setting the game apart from the half-assed crowd. I was wrong again – the flashback feature does an amazing job by helping you correct your erros and cope with the fiendishly high speeds, while acting like a buffer between the blurring speed and detailed damage mechanics of the game. What I mean to say is that it’s so much more more than a mere gimmick - in a game like GRID where ramming your car into the railing can actually break a wheel, Codemaster has managed to cut us ‘not-so-talented-racers’ some slack by allowing us to move back in time every time we screw up.

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To do this, all you have to do is pause the game and go to the Instant Replay Mode. In this mode, you can rewind time up to 10 seconds, and use one of your Flashback points to continue from then onwards – simple, seamless and efficient! To ensure that the feature isn’t abused too much, you only get a limited amount of Flashback points per race, depending on the game difficulty you’ve selected.

The damage system is the best I’ve seen in a long while. Right next to your speedometer, there’s a small icon of your car showing which parts of your car have been punished, and how much. Depending on which side of your car gets abused, your car controls differently. For instance, if your right front wheel takes a beating, taking those high speed sharp right turns becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. And if you’re as un-talented behind the wheel as I am, chances are you’ll bang quite a bit; so you can be sure that by the end of the race, your car won’t control like the way it did when the race started. While this might sound a bit frustrating, let me assure you that most of the time it isn’t, since it adds an extra amount of challenge to drive a car which is a little banged up, and feels like a real achievement when you win a race doing so.

Cosmetically, the damage system is purely orgasmic. Every time you make contact with an opponent, paint gets scraped off your car, the body gets dented, and parts fall off, creating an extremely believable experience. Now I’m not saying that this sort of thing hasn’t been done before, it just hasn’t been done this well! Parts that fall of your car will stay there until the race is over, acting like a cautionary sign of either a treacherous turn ahead or a tale of machismo you tried to pull off but failed at, in a previous lap.

Speaking of cosmetics, the game looks better than any racer that’s blessed the PC before. GRID uses a modified version of the Neon engine (that powered DiRT) called Ego. While it looks a lot like DiRT in many aspects, a ton of improvements have been made where particle effects and reflections are concerned. Even the motion blur has been refined to capture the sense of speed in a much better way than DiRT did. Apart from this, the environments look gorgeous to the point that you’d pause your game just to ogle at the realistic looking crowd or just watch the sun rise during those 24 hour long races.

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There are a many types of events that the game has to offer that extend from Muscle car races, to Destruction Derbies; and of course, there’s Drifting, which is done even better than most of the Need for Speed games that sort of pioneered it way back in the day. The only annoying race mode I encountered was the “24 heures Du Mans” or the 24 hour long Le Mans race. The cars in these races control exceptionally badly, and the race lasts 24 excruciating minutes! Thankfully, they happen only once every racing season, so you can skip them altogether.

The GRID World – or default mode of the game – is structured in such a way that it allows you to pick what sort of race you want to play, and which region you wish to race in – America, Europe or Japan. Each region has 3 licenses – Rookie, Pro and Elite, and to gain them you need to earn reputation points by completing races. The more licenses you gain, the more events you unlock, which stack up to a really impressive amount of races for you to play. Besides earning rep, you gain cash for winning races or completing objectives set by sponsors. You can use this cash to buy more cars that allow you to enter different types of events.

While the game is near perfect, it isn’t as technically sound as it should be. Although framerates are relatively stable, every now and then the game slows down a bit making it rather disorienting. It’s sort of like the game goes into some mutated form of bullet time, where everything slows down momentarily before moving back into its normal speed. While this doesn’t happen too often, it can be really frustrating when it does, since it throws you off balance and sends you crashing into the railings. I’m sure the developers will fix the glitch in the upcoming patch, but it still leaves a dark blotch on this near perfect game.

With that out of the way, it’s been ages since a racing game of this caliber has been unleashed in the gaming circuit. I salute Codemaster for the amount of work they’ve put into fine tuning almost every aspect of the game. The game’s rich in content, and while the multiplayer element isn’t too great, there’s enough in the single player mode alone to keep your engine roaring for hours at end. If you’re a racing fan or even like the occasional race or two, you owe it to yourself to buy this one!