The month of May seems to have started off on a great note, what with E-Xpress Interactive playing Santa and leaving us a PC preview copy of the highly anticipated multi-platform game GRID. Knowing the rich history that Codemasters has when it comes to the racing games genre, the racing buffs in us were eager to try out the latest offering from their able-stables. Certainly then, braving the Mumbai traffic to rush back home was something that we were not really too keen upon. However, once back home and having installed the game, it just took us a couple of minutes into the game to know that all the trouble was worth it.

The game started off by asking us to create a player profile with our first and last name which is fairly routine for such kind of games. However, the first “Wow!” was the direct result of an “audio name” by which we would be addressed both by our pit-crew as well as the narrator. Having your picture on the driving license is cool enough, but having the game call out your name? Beat that Burnout!. Profile creation done it was saved and we were taken back to the main menu.

This being a preview copy, it only allowed us to play the start of the single player campaign in GRID. You start off as a rookie driver who gets invitations to race at various circuits across the globe (US, Europe and Japan). With different countries comes their own distinct racing culture, cars and tracks. Tracks range from race circuits set-up in San Francisco and Washington where we raced around in Zonda and Ford cars to driving the Nissan in Japan and BMW in Europe.
Once you start racing in these invitational races you earn money and reputation points. Unlike other games where only podium finishes helped you fatten your virtual waller,in GRID you are paid “appearance money” for simply participating in the race. It doesn’t matter even if you end up
coming last, though of course, podium finishes will net you bonus sums. The amount of reputation points you earn is directly proportional to the difficulty level chosen by you at the start of the race. There are five difficulty levels to choose from. The higher the difficulty level you choose, higher the reputation you stand to earn. Reputation points help you unlock more licenses and tracks. With enough reputation and money earned you can have you own racing team.

The EGO engine used in this game is the updated version of the Neon engine already seen in action in DiRT last year. Not only does GRID look better than DiRT the performance on our test system was very impressive as well. We were able to crank up the resolution to monitors native 1280×1024, at 4XAA and 16XAF and set the game to run at medium-high settings and yet managed to net a healthy average of 55 fps [ C2D E6600, 2GB DDR2 667MHz & 8800GTS 320MB - all stock]. The in-game menu in the preview build that we got unfortunately did not have the video options menu so we had to change the resolution and other settings from the game-config file. A cursory glance at the game-config options file within the system folder revealed that there are going to be several options which can be tweaked like shadows, motion blur, reflection, cars lod, as well as support for all types of aspect ratios catering to a variety of resolutions. PC Gamers will be happy to know that unlike DiRT, Grid won’t be using the much disliked Star-Force Protection System, but will be using Securom with online activation.

Coming to the core of the game, the game feels like a mixture of arcade and simulation racing. The controls and handling veered more on the side of arcade racing rather than simulation racing. We have one gripe with the game though. The handling on ALL cars that we raced with felt like skating on ice! It didn’t quite feel like say, driving in Test Drive Unlimited or other similar racers where you can get the feel of the tires as the car moves on the road, the friction, the grip, the traction. Sure you could feel the bumps on the tracks and the whole screen would shake with each jump that the car took, but we couldn’t quite get over the “skating on ice” feel of the cars. We still enjoyed the game immensely though and can only hope that Codemasters will look into this “slippery” issue.

The car damage modeling is pretty nicely done, even though the car damage ‘effects’ are yet to be finalized. Crash too much and you can end up wrecking your car. At this point you have three options retire from the race, restart the race or use the “flashback feature”. The “flashback feature” allows you to backtrack to the last ten seconds before you crashed and allows you to pick a point from any one of those ten seconds from where you can continue the race. A cool feature that we noticed was the persistent debris on the track as a result of previous car crashes, formed obstacles you would want to avoid lest you prefer crashing into the side fence or spinning in your car on or off the track or crashing into other cars.The competitive AI racers in the single player mode were competent enough though a touch aggressive. Even at the lower difficulty levels, they would push us off the track if need be. Also they did not drive flawlessly like you may have seen in a few racers; they sometimes crashed into side fences, sometimes their cars would spin or skid because of too much steering or too little steering. No more rubber-band AI for the win!

All in all while it was an enjoyable experience, Codemasters still have more than a month to iron out the tiny niggles and flaws here and there. Once that is done, hopefully in June-08 we all will be treated to an amazing racing game, as GRID has all the makings of one.

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• Ian Says:
  Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 03:02 am GMT +5.5 at 3:02 am

  I read an xbox 360 preview that also commented on lack of feel when driving. This has always been the biggest problem with all Codemasters games – Toca 3 was awful for that very reason. A pity as everything else about their games is usually excellent.

• rishabh Says:
  Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 09:21 am GMT +5.5 at 9:21 am

  Nice preview. The pros and cons of the gameplay elements sound very similar to DiRT. Even DiRT was kind of sim+arcade, the cars felt light and cruising a few inches above the rough terrains, excellent damage system, aggressive AI, and the debris of other cars acting as your hurdle! All in all, it was pretty enjoyable. Hope this one also turns out good!! Keep the coverage going guys!! Well done! cheers!!

• Hahaman Says:
  Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 12:29 am GMT +5.5 at 12:29 am

  that was a good preview man and i have been waiting for this game for a long time seems to me codemasters never dissapoint me i wish i could play games before its released like u guys damn