by Iain Alexander
What’s it all about?
It’s 1998. Codemasters, who up until recently were most famous for Micro Machines and Dizzy, have just released a game called Toca Touring Car Championship on the Playstation, and it’s brilliant. Nothing else like it exists, nothing that allows you to jump into a Ford Mondeo or Volvo S40 and race round every track on the BTCC series, nothing that forces you to carry on fighting to win even when you’ve taken the lead, and nothing as satisfying when you eventually clinch that spot on top of the podium.
Fast forward 10 years, and I’m sat at home waiting for the postman to deliver Race Driver: GRiD through my letterbox. Recent versions of this series have moved away from pure Touring Car action and broken out into a wider range of disciplines, yet for some reason I’m more excited about this game than anything for a long time. Whatever weird instinct I had about this game, it was spot on – this is something special.
The game is effectively split into 2 parts: GRiD World (the single player campaign), and the online aspect. I’ll cover both, but it makes sense to look at the single player first. The campaign is a career mode of sorts, but drops the cheesy story mode of previous titles and opts wisely for a more direct racing approach. You start the single player game as an unemployed driver, needing to take on events for other teams in order to build up a bit of cash and improve your reputation. Each event has a main objective that you’ll need to meet if you want to earn the winnings, and at this stage you generally don’t even need to win anything; just beating a specific driver might be enough for your temporary team. But before long you’ll have the chance to set up your own team, with customisable paint jobs, car numbers and initially a small handful of sponsors. These sponsorships will reward you for carrying out certain tasks, such as completing the race without any damage or finishing in the top 3. To begin with the rewards aren’t huge, but as you win more events you are presented with bigger and better sponsorship deals that offer you bigger sums of money for doing well in races.
After a few races, you’ll get the chance to employ a teammate. Each driver demands an initial signing on fee as well as a percentage of the winnings. Better drivers cost more, but will finish higher and win you more races. It’s a tough balancing act. When you settle on one, your manager will give her opinion on your choice – she’s not always complimentary though; I thought I’d made quite a good signing, until she said “Really? He’s even worse than the last one…” She’s harsh, but she’s fair. During the races there are no team orders, so you can’t instruct your teammate to let you pass or hold up other drivers. That’s a bit of a missed opportunity in my opinion, and wouldn’t been a unique feature that could have been used very effectively. Hey ho.
As you progress through the campaign your wins are converted to reputation which in turn earns you higher licenses, allowing you to compete in the higher calibre competitions. As you improve, the races get tougher, faster and more physical. Other drivers remember if you’ve pushed them onto the grass and try and get revenge, leaders battle amongst themselves and make overtaking tricky without taking bigger risks. You’ll feel exhausted after some of the later races, such is the intensity at times. But if you want a challenge, look no further than the Le Mans 24 hour race. Available at the end of every season, this is a 24 minute race which cycles from daylight, through darkness, and back to daylight with an hour passing every minute. Ever tried driving at 240mph with nothing but your headlights to guide you? It’s tough, but the sponsorship rewards are huge if you manage to finish at the front.
At some point, with all the battling, high speed corners and slightly overly-brave overtaking, you’ll run into trouble and wreck your car. Race over, with only a few corners left. Gutted. But not to worry, as GRiD includes the Flashback system, allowing you to rewind the race by a few seconds to let you take the corner differently, chicken out of the overtaking move or be even more violent with how you tried to barge the leader into the gravel. These are limited, so you can’t do it on every corner, but for occasional hiccups it’s a fantastic addition and one which makes the game far more accessible to a much wider audience.
There are loads of different types of car to keep you entertained throughout the campaign. Races are split into 3 regions: Europe, Japan and America, with each offering a range of track styles and available cars. European tracks include Donington, Le Mans and the fantastic Spa circuit amongst others, with America hosting walled street circuits and the always entertaining Destruction Derby cross-overs. Move to Japan and you get drifting contests, as well as races round the docks with lorries and huge storage containers to content with. The cars (40-odd in total) vary from small open-wheeled F1000 cars, to Aston Martin DB9s and the hugely powerful Le Mans sports cars. They’re not free though, so you’ll need to be careful with your winnings and choose the right car to win you the series. The cars will get damaged during races, and the damage model is impressive and varied, but you won’t need to do any repairs between races.
Despite the depth of the single player campaign, you may well find yourself spending a massive amount of time online. I’ll start with a small disclaimer: as with every game you can play online, it’s only ever as good as the people you’re playing against. If you end up with a room of 11 others who just want to bash everyone off the track then you might be put off quite quickly. But find a room of people wanting to race, or get a few friends together in a private lobby and you’re in for a great time.
The public servers let you vote for a racing series, with the one pulling most votes being selected for the next couple of games. From here you select your car and its livery, and the race starts. Each race has its own car selection, with some series only offering a single vehicle (such as the Formula 3 series) – in addition to this, each series only has a handful of tracks that you can race on. Want to race BMWs round the demolition derby track? Tough. It’s slightly disappointing that you can’t choose to allow your own choice of cars on any track, even in a private lobby, but it’s something you get used to and the variation is enough to keep most people happy. A nice touch is being able to select the paintjob of your own team from the SP campaign, complete with any sponsors and numbers that you currently have on your car. Cool. It’s not on par with the Forza design aspect, but a welcome feature never the less. In public rooms you have an online rank, which obviously goes up as you do well in races. As you move up through the rankings though, progress slows down. You get the most points for beating people of a higher rank, so once your rank is quite high you get fewer points per race because you’re mostly beating lower ranked drivers than yourself. It’s a clever system, and gives a “one more race…” aspect as you chase your next rank.
Private lobbies work really well, allowing up to 12 people to join with full voice comms. Codemasters’ servers aren’t the most robust, and there are occasions that people might lose comms or have trouble finding a game, but generally they hold up well. If the host drops out then the lobby is seamlessly passed onto another player in the group. In these private games you can tweak settings such as collision, damage, catch up and number of laps to give you a setup that matches what you want. You can select from a huge range of events meaning you can easily play for a couple of hours without repeating the same race twice. Lag is minimal, but when it does crop up the game is intelligent enough to realise and ghosts out the lagging cars preventing you from ploughing into the back of them unfairly. It’s this area of the game that has kept me coming back to GRiD. Even now, myself and a few others have a game pretty much every week and still love every minute of it. Very few games remain as fun, entertaining and addictive as this, and even race-ending mistakes such as squeezing 4 cars through the opening Spa chicane at the same time can end up with the entire lobby laughing uncontrollably.
How does the game hold up now?
Very very well. It is still the best racing game on the PS3, although DiRT 2 came close by using the same engine, but it’s a very different style of game. Graphically GRiD still looks fantastic, and the damage model is yet to be bettered. The most impressive part of all this? Read on…
Is it still active online?
Oh yes. Even now there are plenty of people online at any time of the day. There are usually a good number of full lobbies, as well as plenty of others with room for players to join. And the nice thing is, the kids who bought it to smash up other drivers have mostly moved onto something newer and more novel, so you’re left with people who, on the whole, want to race. Result.
Conclusion
So looking at GRiD as an overall package, it’s hard to fault. The single player campaign will keep you busy for quite some time, and the multiplayer adds months to its lifetime. The lack of offline multiplayer is a shame, as is being unable to have a free choice of cars when online, but these are minor gripes in an otherwise fast-paced, intense, good looking racer. And considering you can pick this up quite easily for under a tenner, you’d need to be quite odd to totally ignore it.
Average Price:
£15, but shop around and it’ll drop into single figures.
