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GRiD Race Driver

Written by DM on Thursday, June 12 2008

Another one of the additions you will notice when you are in your garage is that you can not only purchase your cars new, but you can buy them off a virtual eBay Motors as well. When you are ready to purchase a new mobile, you can pick the new one the game offers, or choose “buy on eBay.” If you select the latter, you will be given the option to purchase three different iterations of the car in question, each with different stats. The eBay Motors screen lists the cars total wins, overall price, and amount of times the car was totaled and rebuilt. Of course, you never want to purchase a car that has been totaled too many times, and you certainly want to purchase a car that has a high number of wins. Personally, I like to buy my cars new, but there were a few times where I went the eBay route in order to save 10-15k or so. It may not be much of a consequential addition, but it is yet another little detail that makes the game that much more fun to tinker around with.

As I said there were three additions to mention, and the last may be the coolest. The tracks in GRiD are great-looking, just like the cars. That goes without saying, but what does not go without saying is that the tracks are ridiculously interactive and deformable. This means that any tire piles you plow into, or any railings that you knock out, or even any banners you trade paint with, react just like they would in the real world. These features of the track will send your car flying, and they will go flying themselves if they are not bolted down, as is the case with the stacks of tires. This, in and of itself, is a great thing, but Codemasters takes it one step further even. Anything you knock out of place, even if it comes off a competing racer car, stays on the track until the race is over. That’s right, folks, if you knock anything into the path of the oncoming racers, it will get knocked around by the other cars just like it would in real life. The debris remains in the last place it was knocked by you and the other drivers! When you come around for that second lap, you better hope you got lucky and your opponents knocked those stray tires form the barrier you bashed out of the way. If not, you will be in for one hell of a crash when you hit it going 180mph. What a way to add realism to the game.

Of course, no game would be complete these days without a multiplayer mode, and GRiD does not disappoint. There is a full online mode that is included with the game, and you can race your heart out to claim the top spot on Xbox Live or the PSN. GRiD supports up to 12 players online, and all the events and venues that you unlock in the single player GRiD World mode can be raced online. The online world has the same setup as the offline mode, with the world split up into its three racing sections, and its different types of races. I cannot tell you how much fun it is to race a Destruction Derby with 11 other human beings. Of course, you will find you lose more and more hair as you get your ass kicked, but hey, that’s part of multiplayer fun, isn’t it?

As you can see by this review, even though Codemasters has made a great looking and sounding racer, with a ton of features and some very clever additions, there are also some very curious omissions. It is almost as if even Codemasters themselves did not know if they were creating a racer that fell more on the arcade side of the fence, or more on the simulation side of the fence. Unfortunately, this decision has kept the game from being all it could be in either department. Do not get me wrong, the game is still the best non-off-road racing game that you will be able to play on a home console for a long time to come, and Codemasters deserves full credit. I just wish they would have put their foot down on one side of the line and made additions to the game based on that decision. If you liked DiRT, you will like GRiD. If you like arcade racers, you will like GRiD. If you like simulation racers, you may want to look elsewhere for now, especially if you own a PS3, but I still think it is at least worth a rent for you sim fans. For a solid racer that is not Project Gotham, do yourself a favor and pick up GRiD.

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