While each track has a handful of variations, the big addition to the roster is a new LiveRoutes system. The lack of tracks is particularly strange when you consider Codemasters’ other licenses and the wealth of routes available to them. While the first game had a balance of permanent tracks and fictional routes around real cities, the variety here falls squarely into the latter while these are allegedly authentic to the area that they represent, in the end they all look very similar, and it can be hard to discern whether you’re racing in Paris, Barcelona, or Chicago. Aside from frankly baffling omissions such as Time Trials and lap time leaderboards, the track selection is barely noteworthy, with most of the environments set on the streets of a handful of cities around the world. Given how attractive and robust GRID’s career was, it's disappointing to see it stripped down this way, and with no real-life events such as Le Mans, it ends up becoming little more than a tour of the game’s various modes and tracks.Īnd that’s an area where GRID 2 really lets itself down.
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Beating these clubs results in you adding an arbitrary number of fans to a meaningless tally, which at random points allows you to compete in World Series Racing events, while your garage is furnished with new cars when the game deems that you're ready, with no option to upgrade or tweak the stats.Įnd of season reviews presented as a mock ESPN SportsCenter broadcast help add an air of legitimacy to proceedings, but ultimately this is a nonsensical career mode, and simply an elaborate way to funnel you through various disciplines and vehicle types around the globe. His grand plan is to unify all racing disciplines under one brand, and to do that, he sends you around the world to take on various clubs under their different disciplines, be it racing, overtake challenges, or drift events. The career mode itself, which also includes standalone races buried within its menus, sees you joining forces with entrepreneur Patrick Callahan to help form the ‘World Series Racing’.
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It’s a smart way of differentiating offline and online play, but the separation does prevent progress transfer between the modes and makes menu navigation more difficult than it perhaps needs to be. But while the physical damage excels, save for a few permanently safe areas such as headlights, the mechanical damage is far too forgiving while DiRT 3 penalised you for reckless driving, GRID 2 eschews many meaningful failures, even after hitting a wall at over 100MPH.Īround this model, GRID 2 offers two very distinct modes: an all-new career option and the ability to take the race online. Making contact leaves devastating results, with vehicles often rearranged into little more than a chassis with a roof. But while this is sure to irk franchise fans, there's no denying that it can be an extremely fun and forgiving style of racing.Ĭodemasters’ trademark flashback system and damage model make a return, offering the most robust engine currently available in racing games. While GRID blended arcade thrills with simulation handling, its sequel takes a wholly arcade approach – this is a racing game where drifting around a corner is far quicker than braking and following a racing line.Ĭars now handle with far more flair than they would in real life, with everything from the Dodge Challenger to a McLaren supercar favouring oversteer, forcing you to drift around absolutely every corner, while the physics system is prone to unrealistic results, with cars bouncing violently off one another with little contact. But can Codemasters make lightning strike twice, or are the arcade and simulation genres just too dissimilar to find a middle ground?ĭive straight into a race and it’s instantly apparent that this isn’t Race Driver: GRID, and that over the past five years, Codemasters may well have forgotten what made the first game so iconic. Despite it being five years old, it’s still a beloved title, putting its sequel GRID 2 under plenty of pressure. GRID is considered by many to be the perfect marriage of arcade and simulation, offering a gateway to more realistic driving for novices, and providing a fun alternative for veterans, while introducing a greater audience to disciplines of racing such as Touring Cars and the Le Mans series for the very first time.
Codemasters’ classic 2008 title Race Driver: GRID was one such release. But every now and then a game arrives that blends together the thrill of arcade racing with the down-to-earth realism of simulation, tying the genre together. While other genres have fairly interchangeable skill sets, what works in an arcade racer will send you straight to the hospital in a racing sim the no holds barred action of Need for Speed caters to the former, while Gran Turismo appeals to the latter. The racing genre is divided between arcade and simulation fans.
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