GRID: Candy-Flake Paint on a Shot-to-Shit Chassis [REVIEW]

Posted by Nate Patrin at 7:01 AM Jun 09, 2008

The sun gleams radiantly off each inch of tarmac my tires chew up, and through the dirt and debris-specked windshield of my race-spec Nissan 350Z touring car I spot the next turn, a tight right-to-left chicane that this immaculately-tuned automobile is primed to slink through like water through a stream. My crew chief addresses me by name over my headset, assuring me that if I keep this up, the first-place position I'm currently in is guaranteed to remain mine. It is at this very moment that everything comes into perfect focus: each spectacularly-rendered building lining the street; the warm, glowing high-noon light; every last detail of every single trackside advertisement and spectator and barricade that my car is about to fly past. I am completely absorbed in this luxuriously-rendered world, and for this one moment everything feels great.

Then my car inexplicably loses grip in the middle of the turn, I oversteer in an attempt to correct it, ricochet off a wall, get plowed into by the second (then third, then fourth, then fifth) place driver, wind up backwards, and helplessly spin around doing donuts as my over-amped throttle and feeble traction conspire against getting me going forward again.

Then I give my television set the finger.

On the back of GRID's box there is a promise that, thanks to this game, "racing just got exciting again". This comes as a significant relief to me. Over the last year or so, whether I've been hitting 200 on the downhill end-of-lap straight at the Nurburgring in Forza Motorsport 2, pulling pinpoint e-brake hairpin drifts in Project Gotham Racing 4 or leaping over entire city blocks in Burnout Paradise, I've hardly been able to keep my eyes open thanks to all the stuff that makes these games so very dull and predictable, like customizability or car variety or handling physics that actually make sense. Thankfully, GRID solves all that, so now I can actually have fun playing a racing game. "Fun," in this case, involves being shunted into walls by a howling pack of deranged AI drivers while I flail around impotently and repeatedly spin out attempting to wrangle this ridiculous Frankenstein’s monster of a physics engine.

You would think my invocation of spinning out means that GRID is a sim racer. This, hilariously, is not the case: despite some sim-esque touches (you can turn off traction control, stability control and anti-lock braking for a bigger challenge), Codemasters' newest incarnation of their previously-detail-oriented Race Driver series intends to simplify driving to the level of a semi-arcade title like Project Gotham, where cars handle like accessible, tamed caricatures of their real-life versions. But GRID splits the sim-arcade difference all wrong: instead of finding a middle ground between the two, this game renders some of the physics arcadey -- brakes stop your car a lot quicker than a sim racer's; e-brake drifting is encouraged; there's a bit of room for forgiveness where cornering is concerned -- but still left some important details a bit too far towards the simulation end of things. Handle a turn wrong and you're not plowing through the grass or losing a little speed from ricocheting off a barrier like most arcade titles -- you're screeching to a halt stuck facing sideways or backwards, and getting forward again means using the same kind of gingerly-measured throttle control, regardless of which car you're driving, that you'd use for an overpowered 800-hp monstrosity in a hardcore sim.

Samsung paid good money to get JVC's logo in this game

Leaving the assists on makes things a little easier, but it still doesn't hide a lot of the drawbacks -- sure, you're not spinning out as much, but if you're like most people and play with a gamepad, you'll find that steering the car seems to be a bit of an all-or-nothing proposition. Any attempts to make minor precision steering adjustments will be sabotaged by the floaty, imprecise nature of the controls. And pushing yourself to take a tighter turn sends you at looser, sharper angle a lot more quickly, meaning that any attempts to lithely thread the needle of a tight chicane will often have you ricocheting off the walls. GRID's flimsy steering -- and the cars' distinct sensation of having little actual mass, made worse by the weakness of rumble feedback in the 360's controller (and god help you SIXAXIS users on the PS3) -- completely fails to give you the sensation that you're actually in control of your car at all times, which is a total make-or-break situation no matter how realistic or arcadey a racer is. Even if it's a flawed physics engine, it might've been enough for GRID to give players a chance to get used to it and work out its baffling quirks in some sort of practice mode -- too bad Codemasters made the inexplicably stupid idea of omitting any sort of instantly-accessible free test run or time trial mode in the full game in case you want to figure out how to tame the cars' handling. They also omitted any sort of tuning and adjustment options, which they claim they did because they wanted players to just jump into races without worrying about tweaking their cars' performance abilities. You know, just in case you wanted some kind of advantage in a race or something.

But it's not like mastering the wonky handling is any consolation once you get dropped into a race against actual competition: despite the fact that races can have an impressive starting field of 20 drivers, all of whom have distinct personality traits and their own tendencies to make specific types of mistakes, the AI more often than not tends to batter you around in an attempt to spur some kind of justification for the game's detailed damage modeling. The AI's more humanistic than the racing line slot cars of Gran Turismo, but they lack the no-contact smarts of the opponents in games like Forza 2 -- brake conservatively or take a perilous-looking hairpin too slow, and you'll get smacked into repeatedly by some overzealous asshole. And without the forgiving contact rules of most arcade racers, at least once a race you'll wind up in an intractable snafu that drags you from a potential podium finish all the way to the back of the pack. This is where "Flashback" comes in: presumably anticipating how easily some players might get frustrated where the assorted AI and physics bullshit is concerned, Codemasters integrated a Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time-aping rewind doohickey that takes you back about five seconds, so you can go back and prevent Mr. Camaro and Mr. Tire Barricade from shaking hands. You can use it up to five times per race -- and by "can" use it, I mean will use it.

If I happen to run you down, please don't leave a scratch

Weirdly enough, there's still enough of a pull to keep me going in this game: career mode (called "GRID World") has enough of a carrot-and-stick progression and a crucial diversity of events to keep me interested, from city circuit racing to Japanese drift events to the 24 Hours of Le Mans (compressed into a frenetic 24 minutes). There's even a gleefully raucous demolition derby mode, which actually justifies a lot of the physics and AI nonsense (and is a total blast with friends online), though the first time I saw one of those events unlocked I asked myself "wait, isn't that what I've been doing for the last two hours already?" And even if there's a dearth of car models -- fewer than 50, which even GT5 Prologue points and laughs at, and a number which leads to more than a few races where everyone drives the same model of car -- there's enough variety and detail in the tracks themselves to make me care a bit less. Plus there's no denying the presentation is drop-dead gorgeous, from the menus and GUI (gigantic looming 3-D letters in Eurostile font = classy) to the GT5-trumping rendering of the shiny, glossy cars and tracks to the hyperkinetic, fun-to-watch replays (which... uh... you can't save). But while everyone else is drooling over GRID's stunning eye-candy, I can't help but think: five years from now, every racing game will look as good as this -- and most of them will play a hell of a lot better.

FINAL RATING: 5/10