Racing always was my favourite genre of game back on the PS2, games like Gran Turismo 3 & 4, Need for Speed Most Wanted & Carbon and several other great racing titles were on offer. All with a great amount of content and extremely fun to play for the price they were. However over this generation racing has slipped out of my radar in favour of shooters and RPG's, however 2010 offered up Blur & Split/Second giving me new faith in the genre that sucked up so much of my childhood.
Codemasters are well known for crafting some of the best racing titles out there such as the TOCA & Colin Mcrae rally series. TOCA bit the dust back in the last generation but Dirt remains to be one of the most popular racing titles around based upon the late great rally driver Colin Mcrae. In 2007 however a spiritual successor to the TOCA games was pushed out by Codies and went very much under my radar, a game that I have only just picked up recently and realised that the game I had been searching all generation for was sitting there in the form of Race Driver: GRID.
At its heart GRID is a simulation racer much like Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. But GRID looks at the bigger picture, that most people who play racing games don’t want to be stuck in menu's fine tuning every single aspect of their cars to become the most powerful machines on the face of the earth. It sees that racing needs to be about instant action, the adrenaline of the chase and the beauty of racing in its purest form. You cannot fine tune your cars, you cannot go to an after-market and mod it with spoilers and rims but what you can do is buy a car, take it to the track and race it to your hearts content with some of the best racing A.I, most beautiful graphics and one of the best physics systems in gaming. Now for big racing enthusiast this either entices you at the thought of the most tense racing game ever created or it puts you off by the sheer lack of personalisation you can put in. I think of it this way, if GRID gave you the option to tweak a single part of your car, the tense racing atmosphere that the game gives you is instantly gone, the competition from other racers is diminished and the driving mechanics are instantly less fun. GRID is so dependent on the fact that you cant customise that if you could the game could have easily been one of the worst racing titles in years, yet it ends up being one of the best.
GRID is relatively small in content, it has just under 50 cars and a handful of tracks, however the singleplayer will easily last you up to 40 hours to 100% it. GRID World provides you with a solo experience like no other, you race for teams to earn enough money to make your own. When you do make one you must earn 9 licences in 3 different areas (U.S, Europe & Japan) by competing in tournaments. Once all 9 are earned you can earn the 10th licence, the Global Licence to become the best racing team on the face of the planet. The premise is simple, its just a ladder and you must climb to the top; but the journey there is one of the most fun in racing game history.
Each tournament only lets you use certain cars, there are normally about 2 to choose from but sometimes more or sometimes less meaning that the playing field is so level that you must win by using pure skill. Tracks have been set on either real life tracks such as the Nurbergring or they are set on the streets of cities like Tokyo on a custom track. Each track has been designed to make you push each and every car to their limit, to make you have to outsmart the genius A.I and make you feel like you are a true racing legend if you can pull off the kinds of manoeuvres needed to get through some of the tracks.
Each car handles vastly differently meaning you cant get too used to racing just one car or the others will feel too alien to you, there are American muscle cars, exotic European supercars and the technical masterpieces from Asia making up the roster in GRID, you must earn cash through winning racers and completing the demands of sponsors in order to buy more cars to be able to compete in more races, GRID's economy is in perfect sync with everything in the game. If you don’t have enough money for a car for a certain tournament, you will have to replay an old one until you have enough cash to buy the car needed to compete, you must also race well to attract sponsors that will boost your income if you can meet their demands such as finish on the podium or don’t get too damaged in the race, offering as little as a few hundred pounds/dollars and going all the way up to half a grand and beyond. With money you can also buy a racing partner, you will have to pay to sign them on and they will take a cut of the race winnings but they will often pay their way meaning its not much of a loss of money. Most teammates will race as best they can to finish on podium but sometimes the A.I has a moment and will refuse to move out of last place which can be incredibly frustrating, making you lose money.
