GRID 2 Review (Level 1)

Racing games are always a tricky genre for developers to tackle. The 2 camps of fans want very polar opposite features in their game. The realistic racing simulator fans would want unforgiving physics, accurate track details and in-depth mechanical tweaks. They praise games like GTR2 and rFactor and scorn Need For Speed. The casual racing fan usually likes uncomplicated controls, great graphics and extensive superficial personalisation. Seldom developers would try to balance both as it would ends up shunned by both sides. In the past, Codemaster had a good track record for archiving this though. Their F1 series as well as Dirt series are great balance between technical details and accessibility. 

This got me excited because GRID 2 do have a great premise to work with. It is about a man's effort to create a racing series named World Racing Series that would combine drivers from GT, Nascar, Formula series and D1 GP to compete against each another. It all sounds great until you played few hours into the game.

Gameplay

4 hours into the game, I am still trying hard to find the things that it promised to do. The game progresses by gaining fans through races which would unlock even more races, special events and next stage of the series. You get to choose a car from 2 to 3 choices after every few events but the choice is pretty much an illusion. What is the point a choice when you are given the same type of cars? It would be either 2 American muscle cars or 2 JDM cars or 3 European hot hatches. The entire premise of different styles of driving compete in the same race is a bloody farce. You can only drive what they want you to drive. I have 10-12 cars unlocked but every event I played, I can only pick from 2 out of the lot. Most of the events feature American muscle cars and the game constantly refers the other racers are "the European GT racers and Japanese "touge" racers" This is pretty much racing stereotyping. It's annoying and shallow. Not to mention, the different cars in the same category hardly feel any different with exception of speed. 

Not only that, the game is trying so hard to be stylish and hip. The event menu is like a more or less a YouTube page with occasional message from other "drivers" saying things like "dude" and "you ain't got nothing on me, bro." It feels immature and brash. The game is full of intermission after each race that can't be skipped, it's frustrating and waste of time. It breaks the flow of the game. Also, when your game's cut scenes are unskippable, that game automatically scores 80% and below in my books. We shouldn't put up with these issues nowadays.

Tracks can be pretty in the intro, but quite barren when it's racing.

The customization reflects that as well. You can only change the decals and rim styles. There are no body kits, no spoilers or any mechanical tweaks. On the decals side of things, you get a huge list of patterns, which is pretty ugly in my opinion. Then, you have the sponsors stickers. You get to put sponsors' stickers on your car and each comes with a certain objective. Complete that, you get bonus fans. It feels like you are blackmailed into plastering your car with as much advertising as possible. This is a full retail game, not a free to play online game, mind you. Thus, I find the product placement a bit distasteful. Yes, other games have sponsor decals and company logos in the game too, but in GRID 2, it's right smack in your face. This brings me to the core of the game, the actual race.

The cars are extremely tail happy. The game wants to make every player able to execute cool looking drift around the corner at the flick of a directional key and pressing of the brake. However, it put so much emphasis on it, using cars that is "drift" type, every corner must be taken with your car pointing in the wrong direction or you will be much slower. Don't get me wrong, it is fun to pull off a 3 corners continuous drift. However, things start to get pear shape when cars with "balanced" characteristic also needs a fair amount of drifting. And "grip" cars? It's laughable. Trying to clip the apex of the corner with those cars are a chore and unsatisfying. You will end up using cars with drift properties as it is faster. It doesn't even make sense. Due to this drifting characteristic in the game, corners are wide and long to accommodate it, racing line hardly matters. It's very much designed around the gamepad and meant to play in the chasing cam instead of bumper view. Trying to play the game in bumper view will really test your mettle. Since you are drifting for most part, you can't see where you are going, you need to use chasing game to gauge when your car is going to give into a spin out. Thus, the product placement, once again, come full force into your game. You will be staring at Greddy or NOS at your car's bumper for the entire time.

4 hours into the game, I am only exposed to about 3 tracks. There's like at least 30 races between those tracks. The progression is slow and boring. Working towards the goal of enough fans to unlock the next stage is unrewarding. There are these promotional events that let you earn huge amount of fans. There is a mini game of sorts where you have to overtake 4x4s without hitting anything. The more you can do it in a row, the more points you rake in. Hit something, your combo goes back to naught and doing it too slow, will decay your points. There will be another rival car that runs it concurrently with you. In the normal race, the tracks are wide, suddenly, in the mode, the tracks are barely enough for 2 cars to corners side by side and it's not helping that those 4x4 are big as an elephant on wheels. They usually stays around the middle and move from left to right and back when they corner. It's more frustrating than fun. The only viable option is to overtake them in straight line and tailgate them on the corner. Isn't that totally missing the point of an overtaking event? The time period for each decaying points is so fast that if you are not accelerating all the time, your points will trickle down back to zero again. Its worth to mention, the event is catered to a specific brand each time.

The advertising is totally inconspicuous and not overbearing at all. Nope.

Then, here comes the narcissistic feature of the game. Nowadays, everyone loves to upload shit onto YouTube, especially "accomplishments". The game comes with built in YouTube integration. There is nothing wrong with that, except when the game is in replay mode, the camera angle is horrible. Using the "cinematic" camera view, most of the time, it fails to capture anything but a real close up of your car. Manage to pull off that impressive drift around the difficult corner? Nope, it won't show that. WHAT IS THE POINT?!

Technical Details

GRID 2 is a pretty optimized game. It looks quite pretty on all settings but not as impressive or next gen as the screenshots may have suggested. Intel HD3000/4000 users will be able to play it on medium at 720p quite comfortably and anyone with AMD HD6770 or Nvidia 9800GTX, you are good to go on 1080p. Those with Intel Haswell, there are 2 exclusive graphics settings that will make smoke and transparency looks better. There is however a serious aliasing problem with the game. Playing it without anti-aliasing turned on, the jagged lines can be quite noticeable especially in the main menu. Cranking it up to 4x MSAA or even 8x MSAA do solve the problem to a certain extend but not completely devoid of aliasing. The built in benchmark will help you get the best settings. I would recommend turning off the crowd completely as it is not that great looking and gain a few frames in the process. Also, the global illumination feature is quite a taxing setting, leave that out until you have switched everything on. Basically, you can just follow the settings you have in Dirt 3.

DRM is by the way of Steam and it support achievements.

The details on those advertisement is quite amazing, really.

Verdict

You get a decently fun and forgiving arcade racer dressed in an almost unbearable American TV dramatic flair. The entire article may suggest the game is not worth paying for, well, at least not for the full price of 50 USD. If it got discounted to 10 USD, it is worth a shot. That said, the good thing about racing games is that, the older games will not be outdated. Why not just boot up Codemasters' other efforts that are better than this, namely Dirt 3, F1 2011 or even the first GRID. Fans of realistic racing simulator? Steer clear of this, this is as realistic as Pamela Anderson's boobs. If you have a Xbox, go play Forza. Everyone else? Boot up Need For Speed Shift 2 and lower the realism level and you'll get the game you are looking for.

65% - Spun out.