Game Review: GRiD 2

Developer: Codemasters Racing

Publisher: Codemasters Racing

Genre: Racing

Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3

Website: www.gridgame.com

Age Rating: 3+ (PEGI)

Codemasters are amazing. They’ve been around as long as I can remember, the earliest memory of them being the Dizzy games (none of which I actually managed to finish) before loving the Toca Touring Car and Colin McRae Rally games.

Since the start of the current generation of systems with Colin McRae: DiRT, Codies has been a shining light in the racing genre. Race Driver: GRiD stands as one of the best racing games this gen along with PGR4 (in my mind), joined by the ever improving DiRT series (with the exception of Showdown) and when GRiD 2 was announced, I nearly blew up with excitement.

The question is, can the renamed Codemasters Racing top the sublime original?

I seem to be getting the hang of this blogging business, seeing as I ended that little summary on a question and you’re now reading the full thing. Moving on, GRiD 2 faces stiff competition from not just Forza and Gran Turismo but also from its predecessor.

After Codemasters announced they’d exclusively focus on racing games and pumped out the duff DiRT: Showdown which consisted of many of the things I didn’t like in DiRT, I was hoping GRiD 2 would focus exclusively on racing and drop things like Drift racing, which I really hated in GRiD as the car handling didn’t feel suitable.

Sadly, it seems Codemasters took plenty of hints from Showdown, making a visually stunning and ok handling game at a basic level strangled by a lot of complete unnecessary, half-baked ideas.

 Jumping into the first race, everything feels and looks fine. You’re straight in a supped up sports car without any of the tuning that can bog down some games and racing away through the streets. Your mechanic won’t shut up, but he can be tuned out as you hurtle through the corners.

Problems start to arise when story elements are introduced. You’re picked as the head line driver for a new racing series called World Series Racing (WSR). To help the series gain popularity, you have to race across America, Europe and Asia and the Middle East to grow a fan base and draw more racers to the series. Sounds good, but frankly I preferred having a target of getting to the top of the leader board and making up rivalries as I go along.

The ‘story’, which is actually quite a generous description, ultimately boils down to racing in whichever appropriate continent with a few different game types, bookmarked by amazingly pointless cut-scenes with some bloke from ESPN going on about how great WSR is. When Codemasters announced GRiD 2, they said they dropped the sublime cockpit view to work on other content. I can’t help but feel they wasted all of it on these crummy cut-scenes that bring nothing to the game.

Speaking of nothing additions, rather than credits to buy new cars with you just get a steadily increasing total of fans which slowly and mercilessly goes up after each race, hiding the load time as it can’t be skipped. Credits are present in multiplayer, which has its own slow progression, but why they couldn’t feature in the main game is beyond me. They’d certainly make more sense as you can rarely tell what you have to do to get the most fans.

Codie’s signature flash back feature has also undergone a re-imagining that, while making it quicker to use, just feels unnecessary. I don’t feel punished to use it and I can’t just look over a recent crash unless I remember to enter the start menu instead, which is easily forgotten and I’ve lost a few awesome replays through that. The ability to upload chunks of replays to Youtube is still present and pretty cool. Flashback becomes a limited use ‘get back on track fast’ button in multiplayer, which at least works well.

The lack of cockpit view is an eternal buggerance, robbing the players of online modes like DiRT’s awesome Hard Core mode (locked to cockpit with no HUD or driver aids) and the bonnet cam simply doesn’t cut it, especially as you can’t look behind you at all.

The biggest annoyance to me however is the sheer wealth of downloadable content packs, each given to different retailers as a pre-order gift. It seems like a good gesture, but in reality each pack was originally part of the game and cut out just to make these pre-order incentives. What’s worse, even with the packs, the game doesn’t have much content, even compared to its predecessor and it’s almost laughable when compared to PGR4, Gran Turismo and the Forza series.

When driving on your own, the game feels great. Drifting is as much of a pain as it was in the first game, the cars either refusing to yield grip or gleefully spinning out of control with barely any middle ground, but what ruins the racing is the AI. They simply don’t acknowledge your existence, frequently cutting you up and driving into you as you pass, causing you to spear straight into a wall and a spectacular crash (and yes, that is a video of one of my run ins with the AI). Online isn’t any better as GRiD never did attract the sort of player who doesn’t dream of being Jason Plato or Matt Neal.

The final big feature Codies cried from the hills is Liveroute, a game mode that randomly organises an on-going track ahead of you, giving you no idea of where you’d be headed next. If there were more pieces of track the concept could work, but it’s not uncommon to be lapping the same small track over and over while the timer runs out.

At the end of the day though, good as the game feels and refreshing as it is in this world of racing sims, the lack of content, bad design decisions and the gall of the developers to cut so much content from the game for pre-order traps I just can’t recommend it.

The whole game feels like a bastardisation of GRiD 1 and PGR 3 and 4 with less content then any of them. It does feel good to drive and it’s not as bad and unnecessary as DiRT: Showdown, but it’s sat next to it on the shelf looking over at it’s far superior cousins.

Verdict: Rent