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| PROS: Content, Variety, Immersion, Viscerality / CONS: Gameplay, Lastability by Jerry Whorebach 05/31/2013, 10:00pm PDT | ||||
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| I am the wrong guy to ask about Grid, because it obviously wasn't meant for me. The best example is probably the cockpit view. People adored Grid's cockpit view, even if they liked nothing else about it. Everyone from hardcore bootie-wearing virtual Mario Andrettis to ignorant punk kids whose only experience with simulated racing was driving real-life cars dangerously fast (psh!), everyone agreed that Grid's dynamic, animated cockpits delivered a level of immersion heretofore unseen in racing games. Me, I look at a cockpit view and I see a lot of non-interactive screen furniture that serves no purpose other than to shrink the portion of my TV displaying actual gameplay. If anything, I find it less immersive than an entirely unobstructed view, or even one that shows my own car (that I'm presumably inside of? I don't really give it much thought) from an omniscient third-person perspective. So go ahead and take my criticism with a grain of salt.
That being said, Grid is a game for content tourists. It features an impressive variety of racing disciplines, from classic Trans-Am Series to modern European touring cars to Formula 3 open wheel to Japanese downhill highway battles to good old fashioned backwoods demolition derby. Each season of the unusually thematic and well-presented career mode climaxes by offering (not obliging) you the opportunity to compete in all 24 Glorious Hours of Le Mans, with as much or as little time compression as you want. The AI is human and aggressive, and the damage modelling is as cosmetically-impressive as it comes. Crashes are lovingly depicted in a slightly more grounded take on the Burnout style, and afterwards you can use the Flashback feature to rewind time to just before the crash, sparing you the punishing indignity of having to restart the race and experience the same content for a second time. You can hire an AI partner from a long list of nationalities with unique voices (California surfer, French Canadian lumberjack, Italian house boy, etc) to race with you as a two-man team in cars whose liveries and sponsorships you customize yourself - earning bigger cash payouts for winning with real-life corporate logos in prominent places - and he'll even address you by your own name, which you select from a list like this: It's funny because it's true. Really, Grid was so viscerally cinematic and so packed with features and bullet points that every reviewer in the world can be forgiven for failing to notice the one thing it lacks: a satisfactory driving model. Cars handle like pendulums rotating around a central pivot. The developers claim they haven't used real central-pivot steering since the PS1 days, and that may be true, but at no point do you feel as if your car is planted to the road by four palm-sized patches of rubber in accordance with the laws of physics, the way you would in Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport, or even Project Gotham Racing. The point at which you lose traction is unpredictable, making it impossible to know the limits of your car until you actually reach them, at which time Grid falls back on its rewind gimmick to smooth over any frustration. The inconsistency stifles the potential for mastery, resulting in a depressingly shallow game, and the simplicity means it doesn't even have any real variety to fall back on, despite the apparent surfeit of styles and disciplines. You can make Grid harder by turning up the difficulty, but you can't make it any more engaging. People will tell you Grid was amazing at the time, but "didn't age well". Those are the people whose opinions about new games you can safely disregard. If you want to simulate the "experience" of being a racecar driver (but not, I should stress, the mechanics of actually driving a racecar), get Grid. If instead what your're looking for is a fun, arcadey racing game that's easy to learn, difficult to master, looks great and rewards every moment you put into it, try the previous year's Sega Rally Revo instead. Oof, that all sounds a little harsh. I did enjoy my time with Grid. I ground out all the Achievements, just because I like drivin' pretend cars, and I don't regret for an instant the bargain price I paid for my copy. I only wish it would've given me some gameplay I could sink my teeth into. Three stars out of five. |
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Jerry, what was your final take on Grid 1? NT by 05/31/2013, 12:36pm PDT  PROS: Content, Variety, Immersion, Viscerality / CONS: Gameplay, Lastability by 05/31/2013, 10:00pm PDT Re: PROS: Content, Variety, Immersion, Viscerality / CONS: Gameplay, Lastability by 09/15/2025, 10:28pm PDT |
