GRID Racing Driver

GRID Racing Driver is the latest racing game from Codemasters and is the newest evolution of their highly successful TOCA series. GRID sees you forging a career from rookie driver to team owner by participating in a range of events to earn cash and reputation points, the ultimate goal of which is to be the highest rated driver and team in the world.

When you first load up GRID, you are asked your name and nationality. A nice touch is that by saying I was English, all the in game prices are now in pounds, rather than the ubiquitous dollars or GT’s “Credits” approach. As well as giving your name for display purposes, you pick an audio name from a long list which your team mate and pit crew will actually call you during races. One small gripe is that they use the long version of all the names. There’s Edward but no Ed, Michael but no Mike and so on. Luckily however, there’s also a list of nicknames featuring a bunch of Top Gun references (Maverick, Iceman, Goose), some game related things (Chief, Snake) and some stuff so camp it’s hilarious (Spanky, Wingnut, Turbo). I went with Spanky.

Once past the initial setup, the first thing you notice is how slick the menus are. All the menu items are 3D and can be tilted slightly with the right stick. An entirely pointless feature but kinda nice anyway. From here you have two game modes and the options screen. The options are all the normal stuff including a controls customiser that comes with 3 presets, triggers for accelerating and braking, buttons for it and right stick for it. Having played Gran Turismo a fuckload over the years using the right stick for go and stop, I find it odd using the triggers so I switched to using the stick and re-mapped the gear shifts onto the bumper buttons. The 360 sticks aren’t quite so good as PS2 ones for the purpose, lacking the grippy top that helps you roll the stick under your thumb but they’re certainly not too bad really.

The two game modes are Race Day and Grid World. Race Day is your standard quick race where you pick a track, a discipline, a car, the difficulty etc and go race. Entirely bog-standard and probably only used by people playing multiplayer on a single system. The main bulk of the game is the Grid World mode. Your first task is to earn your rookie licence. In the earlier GT’s the licence tests were annoying as all fuck and despite the difficulty being toned down for the later iterations, they’re still an annoyance. In GRID however, you’re sat in a Dodge Viper and all you have to do is survive two laps of one of the American city circuits. I think I came second on my first attempt. In career mode you’re looking to win money to buy new cars and earn reputation points which boost your world rankings.

Once you have your licence, you have access to the rookie events. The events are split by area, America, Europe and Japan with different types of race in each region. America is city street races and stock car racing, Europe is all track racing and Japan is drift competitions, touge racing and a couple of tracks around dock yards. In addition to the different types of competition, the cars are sorted by type too. You have classic muscle (Old school American muscle cars), pro muscle (Dodge Vipers and shit like that), pro tuned (Mainly Jap sports cars, Skylines, Supras etc), touring cars (BMWs and so on), open wheel (Formula 3,000), drift (More Japs), GT2 (Porche 911, Spykers), GT1 (Koenigsegg CCX, Zonda) and full on Le Mans race cars. Your first task is to earn £40,000 to get your first car ready for action.

This is achieved by entering driver offer races. Available throughout career mode, these are basically other teams hiring you to race for them. You get paid a small amount just for entering and a bonus for completing certain criteria, usually beating a certain rival or achieving a certain position in the race. As well as giving you extra cash, these races give you a chance to try out different sorts of races and cars. You don’t get many reputation points by racing for other people but once you’ve worked through some of the easier events and are onto the faster cars, the financial rewards can be pretty great. As well as straight races, some of the events are tests where you drive round the circuit a few times trying to beat a lap time or a certain top speed. All of the driver offer events pay you just for turning up so it doesn’t matter if you’re really shit, the money still drips in slowly.

Once you’ve raised the £40,000 you’re setup with some Ford muscle car and get to choose your team colours and name and stuff. Once you’ve completed a couple of races you get sponsor offers. You slap sponsor stickers on your car and if you meet the sponsor’s requirements (Ranging from finish the race to finish in first place) you get a cash bonus. After every fice events you enter, you get to drive the Le Mans 24 hour. Until you can afford your own GT2 car, you’ll be driving for other teams. The race lasts 12 minutes in real time and like the real thing, there are all classes of car on track at once. The time changes from day to night during the race too. So far, I’ve done shit at Le Mans but mainly because the track takes some learning and with so many high-speed corners, it’s tough to catch up to the AI cars if you fuck up as it’s generally the slower corners where you make up time on them.

Once you amass enough reputation points in any one region, you’re upgraded to a pro licence in that region, giving you access to more events. You also then get to sign a team mate for a flat fee and a promise of a percentage of the money they make. The various drivers have skill ratings like aggression, consistency, awareness and stuff and also each has a speciality style of racing. They also have hilariously bad and stereotyped accents when they’re bitching at you over the in car radio. It’s worth hiring a Japanese team mate just to hear him say “So, solly, I back in rast prace” after you smash him into the barrier.

That’s as far as I’ve got for now. Completed all the rookie American events and am working through the European and Jap ones before moving onto the harder ones. Also, until such time as I’ve learned the tracks properly and got some faster cars, I ain’t even going to consider going online, there just wouldn’t be much point.

So that’s the overview, how about some specifics?

Gameplay

The most important thing about any driving game is obviously the gameplay. You can make a game as pretty as you want but with a crap game engine it’ll always be a rubbish game (Sup PGR?). GRID’s cars are a joy to drive. With all the driving aids turned off this is a pretty brutal simulation, rear wheel drive cars will launch you into the barrier backwards if you’re too heavy on the gas coming out of corners, the wheels lock up if you brake too hard and suddenly and so forth. Even with the traction control and braking assist on, the physics are great and you feel really connected to the car. You can overcook it slightly into the corners without spinning it every time but you can’t just handbrake round like you’re playing Burnout. Each car also handles noticeably different, the open wheel cars stick like glue to the road whereas the big heavy American things swing their back out at the first sign of a corner for example.

The most impressive thing about GRID though is the damage your car sustains. As with all the previous TOCA games you can smash the fuck out of your car and the damage is reflected on screen. From paint scrapes to losing entire doors, the level of detail in the car damage is astonishing. The damage also effects the performance of the car with fucking up your wheels and veering to one side being the most annoying effect. Smashing in to a barrier at fast enough speeds will result in a Burnout style car crash and a race over…

…except for the best feature of GRID, the Flashbacks. Eseentially, when you destroy your car, or at any time using the manual instant replay feature, you can rewind the race up to 10 seconds and jump back into it. So if you’re halfway round the first lap and go wide into a barrier, smashing up your front wheel you can rewind, lean on the brakes and hopefully avoid the same fate. This doesn’t mean you can’t lose the races however as the number of flashbacks you get per race is limited depending on the difficulty setting you’re using and not using any gets you bonus cash after the race. It is nice though that at the end of a long race, if some fucker nudges you into a tyre wall you don’t have to redo the entire race again.

The next important aspect is computer AI. A lot of racing games feature cars that act more like trains. They sit on their rails going round and round, occasionally moving offline to pass someone but hardly really racing. GRID is quite different. The cars jostle and bump each other, quite often spin out and fuck up corners and will actively try to stop you getting past them. Of course it’s not perfect, on the Touge races for example there’s a time penalty if you’re behind and make contact with the car in front and it’s far too easy to simply outbrake the computer up the inside of the corner and ensure they tap the back of your car as they turn in to get themselves a penalty. For the most part though the AI drivers put up a decent bit of competition, especially on the harder skill settings.

Speaking of which, this is quite a tough game at first. It is more simulation than arcade style so you do need to learn braking points for the corners to get decent laps in. Also, the AI cars drive very clean races on the harder skill settings and are a lot more aggressive towards you. I’ve been playing on the easiest setting while I learn the tracks and I’m winning most races on the first or second attempt. There are four harder settings however and winning isn’t guaranteed on the next setting up so there’s plenty of challenge here I imagine.

The loading times aren’t too bad and while the game’s loading you get shown a load of statistics including how close you are to unlocking certain achievements. Achievements-wise, there are a load with none earning more than 30 points each. Most you’ll unlock just playing through the game but there are a few ridiculous ones for those of you who like seeing a big number next to your gamer tag.

Graphics and sound

Even on my SD television, this game looks gorgeous. The cars themselves are incredibly detailed, especially the in-car view which although almost impossible to drive from, has full cockpit detail. The damage is modelled down to the point of being able to shatter your wing mirrors and every car in the race can pick up the same bangs and scrapes. There can be up to 20 cars in a single race and any debris left on the track remains throughout and can potentially fuck up your tyres. The tyre walls on corners are also breakable and clipping one causes tyres to spill all over the track, potentially spinning out someone behind you. The crowd are all 3D models and when you smash into a barrier near them you can see them all recoiling and ducking the shrapnel. The backgrounds are all incredibly detailed and there are some pretty lighting and smoke effects. There is a bit too much motion blur applied when you’re going really fast, not in a straight line but sliding round corners can be a tiny bit confusing the first few times. Also, there’s no text so small you can’t read it on an SD tv which is a good thing really.

The cars themselves look just like the real thing and once you have your team setup you can colour them how you want. You have a basic colour and can apply one of several preset patterns on top in two colours. Not the most advanced design editor ever but it does a decent enough job.

The sound effects are pretty great too. The engines all sound different, the crunches are suitably satisfying, the break and tyre squeals are well done and not too annoying and you can hear the crowd cheering and whistling as you drive past, along with shocked “Ooh” noises when you bin it into a barrier. The voices of your pit crew are cheesy and American but that’s pretty much industry standard these days sadly. As I said at the beginning, them calling you by a gay nickname and your team mate’s accents are pretty funny. The music in the menus is suitably inoffensive and the greatest feature (In my opinion) is that there’s no music playing while you race, meaning you can hear the engine so you know when to change gear and you’re not subjected to the kind of horrific kiddie metal EA are so convinced everyone who plays driving games wants to listen to. I think you can turn on a custom soundtrack if you don’t have any kind of other music producing device in the same room as your console and are using automatic gears like some kind of homo. There is music during the replays, which are shot in an MTV generation blur of shaky cameras and rapid cuts. They’re ok I guess, if you like that sort of thing. Sadly you can’t save your replays to share them which is a feature I’d have liked to have seen.

Comparisons and conclusion

The obvious comparisons are going to be with GT, PGR and Forza. I’ve never played Forza so PGR an GT it is then…

The game is on the surface, not as extensive as Gran Turismo. There are only 45 different cars and no tuning options being the main deficiencies but in truth, each of GRID’s cars are actually different to drive whereas in GT, especially once you bolt on all the stage four tuning parts, the cars are by and large either FF, MR, FR or 4WD with little to differentiate any cars within each grouping other than the hp statistic. Also, let’s be honest, after the boring building up of your first car in GT to get access to races where you can win proper race cars, who ever drives any of the crappy Daihatsus or 25 types of Honda Civic or puts anything less than the full upgrades in each? GRID also has a shit load more cars on track than any existing GT games, you can smash the cars up and the endurance races are 15 minutes long rather than actually 24 hours which let’s face it, was silly.

GRID is less arcadey than PGR and rewards proper race driving rather than that kudos point bullshit. Again, there’s far more cars on track and the races feel like proper races rather then the more driving challenge feel of PGR. It’s also much nicer looking and the car handling is far superior. If drift racing is your thing there are copious drift events but again, these seem more like proper events rather all the cone dodging and what have you. In my opinion, GRID is far better than both GT4 and PGR4 and probably more fun than GT5 is going to be. It’s an awesome driving game and any fans of the genre should definitely pick it up. I’m having a great deal of fun with it and haven’t even touched the online side of things yet.

Jam it back in, in the dark.