One big hit, a real smash in fact, in the SPOnG office is the fact that
GRID features real cars. OK, so that in itself is no big deal -
Gran Turismo has done that and done it in spades. But
GRID also features crash deformation. One thing
Gran Turismo is famous for is the surreal experience of the huge smashes from which your car emerges without so much as a stoved door panel. In
GRID, your car comes out of almost any scrape all scraped up and if you hit other cars or the armco with more speed your car will start to bend and buckle. It should be a small thing, we know - but it's just not. Despite the fact that we've been lead to believe that crashes without deformation are natural, they remain strangely unrewarding.
So far,
GRID sounds like a pretty run of the mill racer - and to be honest it is. Its one USP (unique selling point, for those unfamiliar with bland marketing acronyms) is the Flashback. Flashbacks are second chances to put things right in a race when you were doing well, but overcooked one particular corner or overtaking manoeuvre and stacked your car.
If you crash badly enough, your car will be written off - and at this juncture you get the chance to abandon the race, restart the race, or Flashback. That third option enables you to turn back time (unfortunately, you don't get a picture of a Cher in a bodystocking astride a 150mm howitzer) by scrolling back through the action - like you do through a porn movie - using
GRID's superb replay feature. You go back to just before things went pear shaped. Then you hit the [X] button and the race restarts. Don't make the same mistake again. Your supply of Flashbacks is limited, and you get a bonus for unused ones, so there's a cost to using them.
After each race, you are taken through your achievements. Miles driven, races won, winning streaks, thousands of yards drifted, etc. It's all too fast for you to read properly, but too slow for my ADHD-addled brain to tolerate. And you can't flip through them by pressing any joypad button. They are presented in a brutal 3D fashion against a drab blurred picture of an armco and what looks like an oil refinery. I hated this whole section - but other members of the team commented positively on it as they skipped through the games reviewing room.
The racing itself is great fun, the cars handle fairly realistically, and good driving is rewarded. My personal style is to try and ram everything out of the way, and to hang back on corners, and avoid braking to carom off cars taking a wider line. This approach does not work in
GRID. Clean driving pays off, braking to take corners at appropriate speeds gives faster lap times. Hitting other cars, if done purposefully, rather than an accidental nudge or rub, invariably affects you far more than it does them. Be warned, if the AI decides you are muscling your way around the track, there will be retribution, it will come when you least expect it and you WILL come off worse.
But for a run-of-the-mill racer,
GRID is certainly a fun one, and one that I can't get enough of. The difficulty curve is set about right. It's tricky enough to be a challenge, but easy enough for you to start getting the odd win before you get bored and go back to
Burnout Paradise. Combined with the fact that it's addictive enough to make you unable to put the joypad down and it looks like Codemasters has another driving game winner on its release schedule.
SPOnG Score 84%
GRID had me simultaneously disappointed with its lack of true innovation, yet unable to put the joypad down. It looks lovely and it drives as lovely. The presentation was hugely popular with some members of the team and loathed by others.
