2016 review of Racedriver: Grid

So, I’m sure there is a large majority of you who have heard about or played this game in the past, but with 8 years of new games and new series’, this is largely a forgotten game nowadays. With all of the new titles (we all know about the Forza’s, Assetto Corsa and Project Cars trio) but I do genuinely feel that in terms of fun, this game is right up there with the big three.

This review will be based on my PC experience thus far (I have finished the game previously on PS3 and Xbox 360, so the only difference will be the graphical settings obviously not available on consoles).

Gameplay.
You begin your racing career by needing $40,000 to restore an old Mustang, this cash comes through the completion of driver offers from various teams. This basically allows you to drive a whole range of cars from different performance levels, you can literally go from a Porsche RSR to a Toyota 86 drift car. I’d go ahead and say that this is more of an introduction to the way the game plays (hence the many car choices). After this you move into the proper game, where you are given the option to race in the US, Europe and Japan. There are 3 tiers to each region, and each tier has a number of different championships within it, and while you can move up to the next tier with only a few championships complete I would honestly recommend completing them all as they each present a different challenge.
As you begin to establish your team more and more, you get offers from increasingly rewarding sponsors which do help immensely when buying some of the higher end LMP1 and LMP2 cars. Team mates also play a vital role as you can basically win double the money per race, and while some of the amateur drivers surely aren’t the greatest of things, once you pickup a high level driver it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were slightly slower and in some cases they may even be faster than you. My word of advice? If you see a driver by the name of “Tom Rockford” from the USA, buy him without a thought. I used him in every playthrough and he’s by far the fastest and most consistent driver I’ve seen, basically rivalling your own ability.
The events don’t take particularly long, you can wrap up a championship in not a whole heap of time which isn’t as bad as you would expect considering you can move between vastly different events and vehicles quite quickly.

Content.
I’d liken the car selection to something more along the lines of Project Cars, they may not have every well-known model to have existed but they sure do have some of the big names as well as some oddities that you surely wouldn’t expect nor have heard of. I’m not concrete on the number of cars, but there never feels like their is too little. I guess this is what Need for Speed was hoping to do, limited garage space to make you feel attached to a car, but Grid does this in a way where you may have four car options for a championship, you can race with only one or you can mix and match, it’s up to you. Moving onto the track list, again reminiscent of Project Cars. Has some of the besties but then has some of Codemaster’s own creation which also include an array of different layouts. These homegrown tracks are nothing short of brilliant, you never even realise that these tracks don’t actually exist as they are filled with track side objects that you would fully expect to see on a real track. As well as the track design being genuinely fun and involving, I can’t say that I was or ever have been disappointed by the tracks they gave. One of the things I must mention however is that the tracks have been simplified to an extent, most noticeable at Circuit De La Sarthe (Le Mans). Turns 1-5 have been modified in such a way which allows you to carry much more speed through them than actually possible, it isn’t ultimately unrealistic, it’s just a different experience to the laser-scanned iterations that we’re used to (we’re going back over 8 years in technology here).

Physics, physics, physics.
Possibly the most important factor in a racing game and when you look at Grid, it’s not Forza Motorsport. Well that was a given obviously, but what I really mean is in terms of physics, it’s nothing like anything out at the moment. It’s hard to explain the way cars handle in this game because although they are realistic in the sense that you can drive in essentially the same manner as you would any other game, the car’s are much tamer and easier to place. I think that it comes down to the fact that the cars have a whole lot more grip than you expect, yet it isn’t like the cars are on rails. The cars still understeer and oversteer as you would expect, and the weight of the car really does affect how each vehicle handles. I genuinely think aside from Forza Horizon 2, this is probably one of the best simcade physics a game has had. To better understand how the physics work, here’s a short video to show briefly how they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d--dy1NeHI&feature=youtu.be
But rest assured, while the physics may not be at the same level as any of the major game we have right now, they are a whole heap more fun as you can blast around tracks, flying off of curbs (literally flying if you hit a curb at the right angle).

AI.
Another key area in a racing game in the AI, and boy does Grid do a bloody good job of it! If you turn the difficulty right up, you shouldn’t expect to win everything. The AI isn’t fast in the way that most developers make their car more powerful and are literally a faster car, this AI is in the same vehicle as you are, but they have the driving ability of you also. Another great thing about them is that they race clean (for the most part) and they actually have different racing lines, they’ll overtake you just like you would and they make mistakes just like you would. So for a game that came out almost a decade ago, it’s incredible to see the AI is better than many of the games released now.

Graphics (PC).
For a game that came out in 2008, competing with the likes of GTA IV, Call of Duty World at War and most importantly Midnight Club: LA, this is a damn fine looking game even by todays standards. The car models are quite good and you can’t expect anything better from a game this old, this may have actually been the prettiest racing game for the time because if you think back to that year, there was no Forza 4, Gran Turismo 5 so it very may well have been the prettiest (don’t quote me). Now moving more specifically into PC specifications. If you have a GPU from the last two or three generations, you’re going to be more than fine to easily play Grid with everything turned up. As shown in the gallery I’m playing at 1440p (SLI GTX770), with absolutely everything turned up and I manage to easily pull 150+ fps, not that you ever need an fps that high but it just shows you how little power you need for this game.

Extras.
This is probably just me, but this game feels as though it was designed to play with a 360 controller. You plug it in, and it has got a button map ready (did not have to change a single one, they had it absolutely bang on…..duhh they made a 360 game after all). But what impressed me most was that the moment a 360 controller is recognised, it changes all of the on screen button guides to the 360 buttons (Instead of showing enter to accept a menu option, it shows A). The controller even can change the graphics settings, which I’m fairly sure is an uncommon ability!

Final thoughts.
As one of my all time favourite games, I simply love it. I can’t fault the game for any factor or characteristic that it has. It’s just an incredibly fun racing game from 2008, so do yourself a favour; go onto Steam and grab it for $15 or wait for a sale and grab it for pocket money, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll be dumping many hours of the day into it!