Race Driver: Grid

Go Fast Man: Start line

Racing fans have been treated with these past few 1001 entries. If you're looking to tear around the city streets, you've got Midnight Club: Los Angeles. If you want a colourful arcade offering closer to Mario Kart, you can try MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

If you've been following along, though, you'll know I prefer my racing games to be on the more formal side - not necessarily in terms of being simulations, just structured into something of an FIA-sanctioned race.

Race Driver: Grid isn't quite the legal alternative to Midnight Club or MotorStorm, but it is a lot closer to my wheelhouse and from a developer with some serious racing pedigree behind them, it's a title that interests me... but one I completely overlooked at the time.

Fun Times

Race Driver: Grid is a game with such a generic name that I didn't know what it was going to offer or why it was special. Luckily, I was aware of its existence enough to snap it up while it was available for purchase - it's now removed from various digital stores for expired licenses and the like, rendering it largely lost to all but those dedicated to tracking it down.

Why would you want to? As the camera zooms in from orbit around the Earth down to the streets of the United States, we rev up this Dodge Viper to find out - it's a bloody good feeling racing game.

Cranking up the settings and letting the 720p output really shine (don't worry, it does go higher than that), Race Driver: Grid looks on the surface to be a really polished sort of arcadey racer. There is a wonderful sense of speed as you scream down a straight, and a delightful amount of control when you dab the brakes and swing it around the corner.

Panels deform and fall off, windows smash, and the air fills with tyre smoke before you get to enjoy it all over again from multiple camera angles in the replay. Grid is phenomenal, in looks and feel, and it hasn't even started yet.

You are the owner of a fledgeling racing team - well, you will be once you earn some funds racing for other teams to get started. Racing well will earn you reputation points and, importantly, wads of cash to pump into your team to buy new cars to race in more events, yada yada yada, you can work out the rest.

What hit me around this time was just how similar these menus were to those of the DiRT series of games. Like, really similar. And the reason is obvious: same developer. I was enjoying Grid because it felt like DiRT, and let me remind you, I played an awful lot of DiRT...

This isn't the DiRT series, of course, but if you have experience with it, you can imagine how Grid drives. While you're not sliding around dirt tracks, you are sliding around the streets, importantly in a mostly controlled manner. It feels amazing by default.

Instead of crashing into everything in Los Angeles or getting driven over in Pacific Rift, I am kissing apex after apex, gliding millimetres from the walls, going nose to tail against my competitors effortlessly - and I'm just a rookie without their own team.

As the bank balance goes up, the amount of paint left on your car goes down, generally. Bumps and scrapes are a part of racing. Crashing is, too, but you don't want to do it too often. You can rewind time to undo your mistakes, but doing so will reduce your bonus earnings, and the mechanic is tied to your frame rate, rendering it almost unusable in certain circumstances.

So let's say you don't use it, maybe you're a purist. Crashing can then result in poor handling, your car pulling to one side with a bust wheel, perhaps. Your HUD lights up with warning lights of some description, but at normal difficulty this wasn't ever a problem for me - not because I didn't crash, I did. Often. I just didn't have any real negative effects.

But there's time for that to rear its head in the future. We still need more cash before we can have a team of our own, and we can find races across the world to rake in the winnings.

Each continent in Grid has its own approach to racing. North American events have muscle cars charging through street courses. Europe has a more traditional series of track events using GT cars. Japan will see street racers drifting through industrial harbours, or up winding mountain roads.

Progress through one continent will only unlock events for that continent, so the game will likely see you bouncing around these locations as and when you get the opportunity to take part in them, which usually means buying a certain type of car.

We probably need a team before that happens, though.

A few events later and we have the £40k it takes to summon the Cavilier team into existence. Luckily, we've found ourselves operating out of a garage with a car ready to go. It needs a paint job, but it's free and we'll be sure to make use of it.

The number of styles available to tart your cars out in is extensive, though getting the colours right can be a little fiddly when everything, menu's included, reacts to the lighting. Still, paint jobs aren't the reason we play racing games, and soon enough this will be covered with sponsors eager to give us even more money if we meet their objectives.

We best get racing.

You don't want to see your pride and joy smashed up before the first lap is finished, but it happens, and, actually, in Grid you kind of do want to see all the carnage. This cracked glass even shines differently based on the light sources you're driving into.

It's a nightmare to drive a track you don't know too well like this, even with a track map, but you can use the right stick to move your drivers head to look out the windows a little. Or admire the footwell on the passenger's side. It's quite detailed, you know. I blummin love this game. Easily pleased, me.

Frustrations

After getting some sponsors and slapping them into place, my car was looking more like it belonged in a racing team, and Grid was quickly climbing up the list of games I wanted to play a lot more of, preferably right now.

Then it crashed, which was unfortunate. It does that a lot on the sponsor screen, I've since learned. Not ideal, but at least it isn't a critical thing to worry about in Grid.

Further Fun Times

I've since played a good few hours of Grid, where I've experienced more styles of racing, including drift events and 24 hour events that take place over the place of about 12 minutes, but have a day/night cycle, which is nice.

I've built my team up enough where I've not only fleshed out my garage with new and second hand purchases (from eBay, no less), but have an AI driver alongside me in most races, also competing for a good position and trying to earn bonus money from the sponsors. You can hire and fire these drivers seemingly at will, and each have their own stats and preferred events. My first employee performs really well in his home events in Japan, but is largely forgettable anywhere else.

Do I sack him and get an all rounder? Do I ignore him? I'm not struggling financially, even when he takes home earnings he didn't really earn. If there was a decision to make about repairing a car or hiring a driver, I'd have to go with repairing a car, but at this difficulty at least, that's just not an issue. Maybe it isn't an issue at all. How much of the game do I need to play to find out?

Final Word

If it isn't already apparent, I'm in the mood to find out. Both Midnight Club and MotorStorm had a learning curve that I've not come close to mastering. Race Driver: Grid has allowed me to hit the track flat out, and I've not looked back since.

It just clicks. It felt good from the start. The only complaint I've found myself with is that the tracks can feel a little wider than you might expect, but that just gives you more space to race through. With all manner of licensed cars and tracks, as well as some made up street circuits, Grid offers something for everyone.

But it's not perfect. It's lacking something. It's incredibly satisfying for me to play, but I feel like I'm just racing for the sake of having something to do. There's no story, and there often isn't in a racing game, but the progress I'm making feels like it exists because games need to task players with making progress.

I guess it was the same in DiRT. The reason you do all these races is ultimately so that you can check something off a list, but the actual reason you do it is because it feels so damn enjoyable and effortless. The physics, the controls... it must have been made for me, and because of that, you can slap pretty much anything on top of it and I'll enjoy it.

Time trials, drifting, head to heads, 'endurance' races... I don't care about the why, I don't need to know the rewards, just let me put the peddle to the floor and enjoy it.

If you somehow find yourself with access to Grid these days and haven't found a reason to play it, get to it. It might not be to your tastes as much as it is to mine, but it's not easy to get hold of, so cherish what you've got and realise that behind even the blandest of names could be a killer game to keep you entertained for a long time to come.

I wonder if I've picked up any of the sequels along the way. Oh, I have? Excellent.

Filling You In

It could be argued that it was a repetitive 20 hours, but it was 20 hours well spent in my book. I had to drop the difficulty towards the end because I was having an absolutely torrid time with some of the car classes, but as someone who enjoys progress, rather than working for and earning that progress, Race Driver: Grid was great.

But it is definitely not for everyone. There's not a Gran Turismo's worth of depth here but scattered in between regular races are drift challenges, head to head sprints, and even a demolition derby. Progress was pretty swift, teammates were hired and fired as required, and so many sponsors were plastered over my car that the money they raked in felt quite meaningless. I could spend it fleshing out my lineup of cars, but generally speaking, you only need one from each class to compete, so why worry about collecting stuff you don't need?

When it's all said and done - and I think it is, already - Race Driver: Grid introduced me to a few more circuits that are already bouncing around my head for a Rallyman conversion. After those from the DiRT series. And after those I've yet to do for Gran Turismo. And maybe even after a little distraction from RC de Go!, who knows.

Fun Facts

The underlying engine is an updated version of that used in Colin McRae: DiRT, now allowing for persistent damage on each and every track. Hopefully not caused by you.

Race Driver: Grid, developed by Codemasters, first released in 2008.

Version played: PC, 2008.