Race Driver: GRID

When I’m reviewing a game, I have a notepad beside me at all times where I write down all of the salient points. These are positives or negatives focussed on items such as features, visuals, gameplay or just general feelings. In the case of Race Driver: Grid, the list of negatives written down outweighed the positives by a ratio of 7:1. The last game I reviewed that had that level of negatives vs. positives ratio was George of the Jungle, and that only got 3/10. So then how does Grid score so much more than that? That can be answered with one word: Flashback!

Flashback is without doubt the best new feature in a racing game for years. It actually lifts what is, in some cases, a rather mediocre arcade racing game into the upper echelons of its genre. Without it Grid could well be languishing in 6/10 territory. That’s not to say that it papers over all of the negatives. Grid is extremely frustrating at times and full of features that haven’t been fully implemented or fleshed out. But just when you think you’ve had enough of Grid and can’t put up with the handling anymore, you take a blind corner perfectly only to hit a car head-on that had lost control before you entered the corner. Choosing to use one of the Flashbacks and rewind the action to a point before the impact. You make the necessary adjustments to safely navigate around the car and watch on as everyone else behind you ploughs into it and wipe’s themselves out of the running. Flashback is fantastic and is at home in Grid as its spiritual successor was in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Perhaps what Flashback does best is ensure that the player is always kept on the edge of their seat. It not only encourages risk-taking, but it also removes the stop-start nature of restarting races where you’re too far away from the rest of the pack. Some (most likely hardcore) gamers will frown upon its existence just like they do quick-save systems. But, as is the case with quick-saves, you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. If you want to try that corner again, you can do so, otherwise you can choose to restart the race or retire. Alternatively you can even choose to play the game in ‘Pro’ mode, which removes the option to use Flashbacks at all. The amount of Flashbacks you receive also depends on the difficulty level you are playing on; starting off at five for the easiest difficulty level and decreasing to one for the hardest.

Using a Flashback can also be risky and can leave you in an even worse situation than had you not used it at all. In one race I came around a corner only to be confronted with a car in mid-air that landed on top of my car, resulting in severe damage to my steering and minor damage to the tyres. Deciding to use my last available Flashback, I rewound the action to just before the corner and decided to take it a little bit faster this time, which would hopefully send me under the car that was about to hit the barrier at 150mph+ and go flying into the air. However, instead of hitting the barrier, the car took the corner successfully and with me now going too fast to do anything about it, I smacked into its rear, writing off my car in the process. Until then I had assumed Flashback only gave me a second chance; it hadn’t occurred to me that the AI drivers might also do something different.

That’s another area where Grid excels in: AI. Without wanting to get carried away (there is still plenty of room for improvement) the AI shown by your competitors in Grid is very believable. Jostling for position, making unforced errors in corners, suffering tyre blowouts and weaving to make overtaking more difficult, the AI on display is so much more advanced than that encountered in its direct rivals Gran Turismo, Project Gotham and Forza. As mentioned there is still plenty of room for improvement and there is an alarming amount of rubber band on display, but they certainly show a lot more realism than you’d expect from an arcade racer.

Grid is also the first racer I’ve played where not winning the race doesn’t feel like a failure. Due to the ability to choose your sponsors, who all offer up a variety of different objectives from just finishing the race to finishing higher than fifth place before they pay out any sponsorship money, obtaining a podium finish isn’t necessarily a bad thing and still feels like a success. Choosing your sponsors also becomes very tactical, especially when your team expands and you recruit a team mate to drive for you. Those that require a first place finish usually pay out the most money, but then you can’t both finish first and what if neither of you do? The main sponsor of the car also pays out double, so again do you go for the sponsor that pays out £15k for finishing first, or do you go for a sponsor who pays out £10k just for finishing the race?

But despite the excellent Flashback feature and the rather impressive AI, I do have to go back to that long list of negatives. For instance you will encounter no weather effects in Grid. No rain, no ice, no fog, nothing but glorious sunshine (and a smattering of night time driving). eBay Motors at first appears to be a positive, only to then turn into one of Grid’s great ideas badly implemented. Why would anyone choose to buy a second-hand motor, that has been involved in 67 races, has 32,000 miles on the clock and been in five major accidents, that is only £3,000 less than the cost of a new vehicle? There are no bargains to be had on eBay Motors and you won’t even have to use it to sell any vehicles you own as, due to the lack of cars available to purchase (only 45 in total), there is plenty of money available to buy whatever you want, whenever you want. Seasons are also far too short and result in the season’s finale, the Le Mans 24 hours (raced over 12 minutes in real time), occurring far too frequently.

Online it’s a bit of a mixed bag, with very few modes and no ability to compare the performance of the cars available for the race. It’s also quite barren on the PS3. I never managed to compete in a race with more than seven participants in (maximum is 12) and I’ve never finished a race with more than three participants still racing at the end. There’s also the usual smattering of idiots who find it amusing to ruin the experience for everyone else by trying to take people out on corners or racing around the track the wrong way. There’s also a distinct lack of split-screen multiplayer, which is irritatingly starting to become the norm these days.

Then we have the damage modelling which has been much lauded by many other reviewers. Quite frankly it isn’t as good as some would have you believe. Yes the crashes are the most spectacular seen in any racing game to date, with debris flying everywhere and remaining on the track for the remainder of the race, but the damage modelling on the cars really isn’t all that impressive. Driving into a barrier and then choosing the reverse camera to survey the damage really shows up quite how laughable the damage modelling can be at times.

Grid’s visuals have also received large amounts of praise from people within the industry, but again they’re not as good as you might initially be led to believe. At first glance I thought Grid was stunningly beautiful. But after a few hours with the game the overused motion-blur started to irritate and I noticed that the car models weren’t a patch on those found in Gran Turismo. It’s still one of the nicer looking games around at the moment, but once the initial wow factor wore off it wasn’t as impressive as I first thought.

And that’s what worries me with Grid; once the wow-factor of Flashback wears off, does it do enough elsewhere to retain the interest? I put in 15 hours for the review and I was still enjoying myself to the very end, but my enjoyment was starting to wane, mainly due to the awful handling. I still occasionally play Project Gotham Racing 2 on the old XBOX (released five years ago) due to the superb mix of arcade racing and superb (if not necessarily realistic) handling of all of the cars. Grid’s handling though fluctuates wildly between vehicles and is incredibly twitchy. Even after 15 hours of play I never felt totally in control of the cars, something I always did after only a couple of hours with Grid’s competitors.

Grid’s cars feel as though they’re being driven on ice, with very little grip and a tendency to oversteer should you even think about trying to accelerate before perfectly straightening out your vehicle. It doesn’t help that the analogue buttons on the PS3 controller aren’t implemented as well as they could have been. Only approx 50% of the range of the R2 button is used, which makes it very difficult to apply the right amount of acceleration and inevitably ends up with a feathering technique having to be adopted to successfully take a corner at high speed. Bizarrely racing with either of the bonnet cams does appear to reduce the handling issues a little and they are certainly less twitchy than the external cams (which is very similar to the handling issues encountered in Sega Rally on the PS3), but it then becomes almost impossible to detect some corners before it’s too late. The XBOX 360 version is slightly more controllable (and as a result, would likely score a point higher if I were reviewing that version) but it still has issues.

Once you were proficient at any of the Project Gotham Racing games, it was fairly easy to navigate a course without any major hiccups, as it was quite easy to look at an upcoming corner and know, give or take a few MPH, the speed that you needed to slow down to, to take it. This is never the case in Grid as often what looks like a tight corner can be taken at ridiculously high speeds and gradual corners can require some very hefty braking. If you want to compete on anything higher than the Normal difficulty level, you really have to invest the time in knowing the tracks before hand, which isn’t ideal for an arcade racer.

Some ‘high-performance’ cars, such as the Lamborghini, also seem reluctant to corner at all, with even the most gradual of corners causing them to take a trip onto the grass due to the excessive amount of understeer, whereas Touring Cars can be thrown about the track like rally cars and often require little-to-no braking to get round even the most toughest corners.

And this is what makes me feel that I’m already done with Race Driver: Grid and can’t imagine returning to it in five years time. The handling is far too erratic, making the use of the Flashback less about having fun and more of a necessity in order to keep frustration levels down after yet another crash where your car became far too twitchy in the corner.

Grid won’t be for everyone, that’s for certain. Where some will revel in its arcade goodness and manage to overlook the half-baked features and twitchy controls, there will undoubtedly be some that want a return to the glory days of Codemasters’ TOCA series, where racing was both fun yet also realistic and featured AI that still surpasses that found in most of the games released today. There’s certainly a good base to build on here and I’m really optimistic for the future of Grid as a series. But Codemasters really need to go back to the drawing board and deliver a better handling model, something to rival Project Gotham Racing, Gran Turismo or even its old TOCA games, if they want Race Driver: Grid to be more than a one-hit wonder.

Our rating

8/10