Review: Grid 2 (XBOX 360)
Grid 2 places its foot firmly to the floor, breaking away from other more well known games in the racing genre.
Following a long, five year wait for this sequel to the BAFTA award-winning Race Driver: Grid, has Codemasters been successful in creating a new type of racing experience that is capable of standing out among the Forza, Need for Speed and Gran Turismo’s of the world?
We drove this baby off the lot and took her for a spin to find out!
The Review
Split up into two very different mode — single player and online multiplayer — Grid 2 is all about white-knuckle speed while at the wheel of a handpicked selection of the fastest cars the world of autosports has to offer.
In single-player you assume the role of a rookie driver who’s tapped by millionaire Patrick Callahan to help him achieve his goal of creating the ‘World Series Racing’. To this end, you’re tasked with competing against some of the world’s most prestigious racing cubs in hopes of gaining their support.
Grid 2’s single player mode follows this formula through for three seasons, before breaking open to something much larger. Though whether you’re competing at a club level, or in a huge championship event, the single player career mode will keep you enthralled the whole way through.
While there’s several reasons for this, it’s all mainly tied up into a strong sense of achievement and reward you feel as you progress through the seasons. On a basic level, the earning of fans as you complete events provides you incentive to push forward and do more.
Collecting fans allows you to open up season championship events, afterwhich you can move onto the next season. It also ties into the very social network-y vibe running through almost every aspect of Grid 2, and this is all but a good thing.
When it comes to stepping behind the wheel and racing, there’s a number of different race types you’ll encounter that will keep things continuously fresh. Outside of the normal lap races, you’ve got drift events where the racer with the highest point-count wins, or elimination rounds where you need to stay ahead of the pack and outlast your opponents and more.
Pair the above race types with the vehicle challenges and promo events that, again, offer something different from the standard fair, and you’ve got a racing game that is constantly changing things up. The same however, cannot be said for the limited number of track locations.
By and large, you’ll race across three tracks during any given season, and while this opens up later on it’s still the same track and routes over and over. This rubbed me the wrong way since it felt at odds at the wonderful variety of events available, something that Codemasters may look at improving in the next lap.
In respect to actually driving, Grid 2 strikes a beautiful balance between the technical driving found in Forza and the arcade-type “go as damn fast as you can” feel of Need for Speed. So if you’re looking for a racer where you can customise your engine, spark plugs and so on, go somewhere else. Grid 2 is all about going fast and making it look good.
“
Grid 2 is a racing game car lovers and non-car lovers alike can enjoy
That said, each of the hand-picked cars on offer do boast an impressive level of real-world difference in respect to handling, power and so on. This means if you take a car prone to swinging out its backend around every corner, you won’t be wanting to take it out on the mountain tracks (seriously).
Despite a shortcoming in respect to the number of available tracks, the single-player in Grid 2 is unmatched, and is perhaps the best career mode I’ve yet seen in a racing game. This same level of enjoyment, however, isn’t found in the online multiplayer.
Powered by Codemasters’ RaceNet community, you can jump online through the main menu and start racing up to 11 other human players at any time. Doing so will see your online rank raise, in-game cash drop into your bank account and various weekly challenges completed.
And while this is all good and fun, I sadly didn’t see enough of a draw to keep coming back to the multiplayer. Even the much hyped rivals system — where you try to beat a matched rival’s (anonymous or a friend) fastest time/highest score — didn’t seem as appealing as the sharp progression/reward draw of the single-player.
Rather than write off the multiplayer off altogether, lets instead assume this is all teething problems relating to launching this all-new service. RaceNet is indeed a powerful online community with a lot of work having gone into it, especially the YouTube uploading tool built into both modes of the game.
In my opinion most, if not all, racing games look mouth-watering when it comes to visuals, and Grid 2 doesn’t disappoint. Though despite the lack of locations on offer, the tracks in Grid 2 do look pretty breathtaking thanks to some sharp lighting and large, expansive vistas to look at as you race.
Likewise, the attention to detail in the car models themselves is impressive — even if a game like Forza Motorsport 4 has slightly better models by a small margin. When it comes to car damage however, Grid 2 is leagues ahead. Smashing up your car is most satisfying and amazing to witness, and if you chose to in the options can be entirely cosmetic as to not have any effect on performance.
The Verdict
With an addictive and rewarding single player mode, Grid 2 is a racing game car lovers and non-car lovers alike can enjoy. The difficulty curve is just right, while the feeling of handling the cars strikes a nice balance between the technical and pick-up-and-play arcade feel.
Grid 2 takes off from the back of the pack and finds itself in first place, despite taking a few knocks when it comes to its fledging online features and limited track number.
