Apparently, Codemasters has always been making good racing games. With a heritage of the TOCA series and DiRT, the last entry into the series was a little known title called GRID which was one of the games that I've been toiling away at for the past three weeks. My story with GRID is somewhat of a journey that I've had with racing games by Codemasters starting with DiRT and is the subject of a line of something that I'll be including with many other game experiences on my GIantbomb Blog from time to time called: Sore Thumbs.
For a great deal of time I used to play mostly arcade racers such as the Need for Speed Underground series (and beyond) and Midnight Club because they were really fun to play on the PC. I've heard of the TOCA series but never really got into that style of games until DiRT came out and that was officially my introduction into this set of challenging racing games. Right off the bat, DiRT to me was really hard and started to become frustrating just to race a single course. It's apparent realism was a boon for those who appreciate the genre and since the graphics engine and damage modelling were nonetheless impressive, it was impossible to do certain things that a lot of us casual racers take for granted. For instance, it was very difficult to anticipate turns which is kind of embarassing because you'd figure you'd pick it up with someone telling you what the next turn was. This, of course, wouldn't be so bad if the handling in general wasn't so...sim-my. I understand that there is a certain degree of realism with steering a rally car but I always found that resetting a race more than 10 times for a single track can get annoying, especially since being cautious on the track with super-sensitive steering doesn't exactly win you the race. I think I got about half-way through the game before I realized that DiRT had me beaten and that I would chalk it to something that was more of a hardcore driving experience for well-heeled fans rather than arcade driving boobs like myself.
Of course this all changed when GRID was announced, at least in my mind. Codemasters announced that they were bringing out something that at the time looking like it was taking on Forza, PGR and Gran Turismo in the looks department while overshooting NFS in depth. This was promising especially since Codemasters was kind enough to include a demo before it's release. As an ethusiast gamer, when a game has me defeated, I always plot to go back to the game at a later date and try to beat it even if it kills me. Since GRID was in my eyes a spiritual successor to DiRT, it had that much more appeal to me in that respect so the baton was passed and I was going to exact my revenge with this new game. I actually picked up a copy of GRID when it came out but to my dismay, the nightmares I had with DiRT immediately came back to have me shuddering once again with every crash and turn. Most races were terribly unforgiving and it was only a couple of hours later before I decided that I was going to play other games and leave this one aside for a long time.
So almost a year later and here we are, three weeks in it so far as I tackled GRID once again and I'm still toiling away at it. Codemasters definitely made a title that could make up for missing DiRT or any of the TOCA games because it covers a lot of ground but boy is it something that can often times be unpleasant. While GRID is not numerous in cars like other racing titles of it's calibre, the line-up is nonetheless impressive given the types of races that are available and the fact that they've put in Drifting to thumb their nose at NFS. It separates American, European and Japanese race types nicely as the career campaign gives you an opporunity to tackle a multitude of racing classes with added extras such as Destruction Derby and Endurance Le Mans races. Since GRID employs the always beautiful Emotion engine from DiRT, there is no argument that the presentation is nothing short of stunning as replays, for instance, often times looks more realistic than is given credit. Environments are well laid out to look like professional racing circuits, complete with grandstands and screaming fans, not to mention the car models themselves are meticulously presented in a true-to-life fashion with very convicing damage modelling. But I would like to point out a criticism of the visuals in that because it's so realistic, sometimes you can't see which turn is coming up which makes memorizing the tracks that much more annoying. If you race a track for the first time, it's easy to get distracted with the everything seems like it's blends in together and crash your car right from the get-go. Though the visuals themselves are stunning and all, I found that there is not really anything that can help guide you through the tracks except for the some of the tracks having tire marks which are mostly hard to follow if you want to go fast enough to keep up with everyone. I suppose that everyone's milage will vary because bigger screens and higher resolutions (depending on which platform you use) but it seems like a tragic tradeoff. Actually, it sounds pathetic but I would surely like the option to have some turns announced to me rather than hearing that some guy in front of me might have spun out.
The visuals themselves can lend itself to the overall appeal of GRID but that isn't to say that it's looks only, the challenge factor as a driving game takes thing beyond what most casual drivers would expect and quite frankly, would challenge what they could initially put up with. As with DiRT, the damage modelling is not only for show, it gets applied to the performance of your car and should you smash it up too much, it could render your vehicle useless - which honestly, after a dozen restarts due to crashes in a single race isn't all that much fun. While in DiRT this was actually something that people could hold against it, GRID presents the ingenious 'Flashback' system where you can rewind the race from the point of a crash and with limited tries, go back to the instance before the crash and start again. One thing is for sure with this feature, if GRID never had this, I don't see it being popular with anyone except hardcore racing sim fans because the game itself could be quite punishing. I myself can't decide what's more difficult, the cars, the racing types or the tracks themselves. While it's great to have an extremely challenging racing game, there are some things that I've put myself through with GRID to ensure that I'm playing it the way it should be. First, I refrained from playing the game on Basic. I wanted to race with having the normal challenges by taking my lumps if I make a stupid turn or ram into another car in bad taste to get ahead but often times a typical race would be restarted at least 20 times just to both get used to the car that I'm using and to have intimate knowledge of that particular track to make specific turns at whichever speed that would allow me to stay with the pack.
I suppose that putting so much work into each race made winning first place a bit more satisfying but I couldn't help but find that with a great deal of the races that I've played, I had to be more aggresive than I wanted to be in trying to get ahead or else I'd be in excruciating pain inching my way past each car only to have the last lap end in a crash that I'd be using Flashback to correct over and over. Another interesting thing is that I've discovered that you are the sole instigator of problems on the tracks meaning that if you ram into everyone at the beginning of a race when hitting a massive turn, it will be the only time the AI makes stupid mistakes or crash into others in bad taste. If you don't drive crazy or ram anyone for fun, then everyone else drives fine and spin-outs are far and few between. After playing so much of the game I still don't know what to make of it and that's quite unusual. What is kind of cool is the fact that even though Flashbacks are there to undo some damage to yourself by an ill-placed turn or taking too much damage recovering from one, backing up and starting an instance again causes the AI do whatever they did originally completely different. At first glance you'd imagine that that would be expected in general given the type of system it is but it's interesting to see that not only would you do your turn again differently, the AI will do whatever it did previous differently as well. Having said that, Flashback is there for you to recover from crashes and there will rarely be an instance where you will use it just to have the AI repeat a mistake they made just to have another opportunity to dodge their mistakes because when you rewind to that point, you'll have only milliseconds to avoid it.
So far my personal vendetta against GRID has been bittersweet as only recently becoming accustomed to tracks being repeated works in my favor but the fact that different classes of cars handle vastly different from each other make it an absolute nightmare to make myself learn lessons from previous races. I still restart races an average of 20 times per race and more often than I'd like to, I skip 24hr Le Mans races because it's still so damned hard. I honestly can't tell whether it's the handling of the cars in general or the misplaced realism of the both the cars and tracks combined but GRID will give anyone sore thumbs after one day of giving it their all. Nevertheless, I still intend on finishing it because I will not let a game defeat me like DiRT did previoiusly, but if I don't get better, it will be a painful experience.
"A driver has spun out. Whoa, I think it's......YOU"
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