GameSpy Review of GRID

Ever have that anxiety dream about being behind the wheel of a car that's going too fast for you to control? There's the screech of brakes and then a horrific metal-twisting encounter with a wall, barrier, or other car and you sit bolt upright in bed with sweat pouring down your face. Codemasters' latest racer, GRID, will let you experience that nightmare scenario whenever you want. While the game straddles the fence between the worlds of arcade and sim racers, there's enough here to speed up the heart rates of fans of both.





Apparently, the folks at Codemasters wanted to do some housecleaning and tweaking with the leap to the next-gen machines. The company's stellar Colin McRae series of rally racers ended up as DiRT when it landed for the PS3 and 360. (Of course, much of this probably had to do with the untimely death of McRae.) When it came to its more traditional racer, the company also decided to throw out a four-letter-word. The TOCA Race Driver franchise has evolved into GRID. (The move to the next-gen consoles also, it seems, affected the company's ability to figure out the appropriate uses of uppercase versus lowercase letters.)





GRID bags a lot of what made the Race Driver series so interesting. Gone is any real sense of a backstory. There are no tales of revenge, no angry rival racers yelling at you, etc. Other than getting to choose your name and nationality and eventually getting to name and design the look of your race team, there's not much drama to hang things on. Yes, it's cool to have your spotter call you by name, but if you're looking for a lot of the CarPG elements that made the series unique, you may be disappointed.










What does make GRID unique, though, is the way things unfold once you get out on the track. Racing is a bizarre mix of the ultra-realistic and the surreal. In a nod towards realism, no two cars really feel the same. While there are less than 50 cars available in the game, they all bring some serious horses. It's a veritable who's-who of cars you'll never own in real life. You go right from a cranked-up Porsche to a Lamborghini to a Koenigsegg. Cool? Yes. But on the downside, this means that you don't get to get a feel for things behind the wheel of a stripped-down Mitsubishi Lancer, for example. Everything you have to drive is a beast and that can make the initial learning curve somewhat steep.





The realism continues in the look of the cars and tracks. The amount of detail in both is astounding and makes Forza Motorsport 2 look like a low-poly rough draft of what a racer can be. The presentation -- both during the race and in replays afterwards -- gives you an uncanny sense of going really, really fast. Another very nice touch is the realistic damage that not only shows on the cars, but affects the way they handle. Kiss the wall too many times and your alignment will be eerily reminiscent of that of the $450 car that you bought when you first got your license.















And that leads us into the surreal. Having played Codemasters' releases forever and knowing them to be no-nonsense sims once you were in your car, it was a bit strange when in one of the first races we got side-swiped, slammed into a barrier, and did a barrel-roll that miraculously threw us into first place. For a game that in many ways tries to play the sim racer card, GRID does a really good job of letting you get your Burnout on.





It's this marriage of sim and arcade elements that make the collisions you'll get into so horrific and visceral. It doesn't matter how many zillions of crashes you've been a part of as a gamer, the carnage here is a step above. It's sudden, violent, and final. There's not a hint of "I think I can still drive this thing" optimism left. At the high speeds you're traveling at, when the stuff hits the fan, the damage can be more than just a bit unsettling. And if you're lucky enough to be able to crank the game out in high-def at 1080p, you'll be even more disturbed and creeped-out. (The PS3 version only supports up to 720p.)





The boundaries of the surreal are pushed even further with the game's "flashback" feature. Once you've finally recovered from the shock of your latest vicious accident, you can turn back time to before your wheels were reduced to a mangled and crumpled mess and enjoy a -- hopefully -- less violent re-do. Depending on what level of difficulty you're playing, you can have up to five of these do-overs in a single race. The concept definitely further distances the game from sim status, but considering how difficult some of the racing can be, it's a feature that you'll be glad you have access to.










While the game falls short of the 30-something different types of racing that you could bang away at in TOCA Race Driver 3, there are a lot of ways to air things out here. The game is broken into three main areas and each has a different feel. The street racing you'll do in Japan is different from, say, the stock car racing you'll do in the U.S. or the GT racing you'll do in Europe.





The guts of the game lie in the Grid World mode, where you'll progress -- as you do in just about every other racer -- by winning races that unlock new circuits and challenges to take on. If you just want to try something different, the Race Day mode offers everything from drift races and competitions to touge racing, which throws you one-on-one against a foe on winding, vertigo-inspiring mountain roads. Online, a very user-friendly lobby system lets you hook up with up to eleven other players in a variety of different racing styles.





GRID may be somewhat of a shock to gamers used to Codemasters' more typically traditional take on motorsports, but once they get over any initial apprehension they'll be enjoying a very solid racer. This hybrid of sim and arcade racing may take some getting used to -- its learning curve is steeper than your average Burnout or Need for Speed -- but the time investment is worth it.

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