As with films, we’re at the point where we need to add the year of release to video games to disambiguate between games with the same title. I’ve played many of Grid series of games over the years but I don’t have the kind of passion I have for rally games when it comes to circuit racing. However this is also the first time I have played a Grid game with my racing wheel and in fact only the second game I’ve played with the wheel at all.
Despite being a soft reboot, this game doesn’t pretend to be a realistic simulation. You only need to go into the tuning screen to see how few options there are and as other players have pointed out, you’ll only ever need one setup as it works perfectly for every car in the game. I chose to play this at normal difficulty as I didn’t want to spend too much time fully mastering it. This meant that the AI wasn’t too difficult, some assists are on and most interestingly the optimal racing line is displayed on corners. This last feature was highly useful to me as it also shows when the car is moving too fast for that corner and lets you know how much to brake in order to navigate that turn safely. I’m sure the feature was present in previous games but I haven’t paid much attention before I only started taking this more seriously now that I have a racing wheel. Though this isn’t a simulation, the physics model is still rigorous enough to reward good driving and seeing the racing line like this was a great help in properly learning circuit racing this time around and I had a good time experiencing all of the different cars.
The single-player career mode is weak in that it doesn’t feel much like the career of a real driver at all. It’s just a set of preset races across the various classes of cars culminating in a showdown event. Win enough of these showdowns and you qualify for the championships which lead to the end of the game. The only team building feature is that you can hire a driver as a teammate and I have no idea what is even the point of that. Only personal victories count towards progress so hiring a good teammate actually means stronger competition for yourself. The only upside is that your teammate helps you earn money but money means nothing in the game at all as there are no repair or maintenance costs and the cost of buying cars rapidly becomes irrelevant. Personally there are in fact enough cars and tracks, including variations of each track, to satisfy me. A more substantial career mode would have been nice but I’m also glad that this game dials down the edginess and bombast of some of the earlier games. There’s actually very little commentary here, which is just fine by me.
As I said I do love the variety of cars and tracks even if some of the subtleties of the differences between car categories are sometimes lost to me. The game is realistic enough that you can feel the differences between the cars, such as how you have to practically wrestle with an American muscle car to point it approximately where you want to go or how a Ferrari or a Porsche are less powerful but responds so readily to every command. One buying mistake I made was in the Super Modified subcategory of tuner cars, opting early for the extremely powerful Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI. It turned out to be far too powerful and heavy for city driving however so I bought another car in the same subcategory, the Honda Civic FD2 and had a much better time with it despite it being much less powerful. This game includes a single F1 car, the Renault R26, to mess around with. That was enough for me to realize that I have no idea how to drive F1 cars and that they’re so different in how they handle that they’re practically not cars at all. More fun for me was the invitational series of events that features historic cars including the famous Ford GT40 and a version of the Ferrari 330 P that we’ve seen in the film Ford v Ferrari.
As for the tracks, Malaysians will surely appreciate that it includes the Sepang International Circuit. It’s not one of my favorites but with its long straights followed by hairpin turns, it’s surely one of the more technically challenging tracks. When it comes to dedicated tracks, I prefer the classic ones in UK: Brands Hatch and Silverstone. There are also city locations which are always the most picturesque including Shanghai, San Francisco and Havana. For some reason my weakest location is Barcelona as I do notably worse against the AI there than anywhere else. One fictional track is based on the real Okutama and it’s one I really like as well, though it is perhaps a little too pretty to feel quite real. It’s also the only location that includes significant hilly sections and that kind of makes me wish there were more tracks featuring those in order to indulge in my Initial D fantasies. I think the game allows any combination of car category and track selection if you really want to, even when it doesn’t make much sense. It’s kind of crazy to allow F1 cars to race around in the streets of San Francisco for example, but I suppose it’s up to you. Note that each track comes with multiple variations include reversed versions. This can sometimes feel a little unfair in that the sightlines are set up all wrong when driving a track in reverse.
As much fun as I had with this, there is a reason why my passion when it comes to motorsports games is rallying and not circuit racing. Any track gets boring after a while when it’s all asphalt all the time. Then there’s the aspect of racing with AI drivers. Sure, seeing yourself fall behind makes for powerful motivation for pushing yourself more, perhaps even trying to understand why the AI is seemingly faster on certain corners. But as always it’s frustrating when you get keeping rammed from behind. Even your AI teammate will do it to you and you get yelled at when you do it to your teammate. I far prefer racing myself in the countryside and if I really want to push myself to get faster, I can always turn on a ghost car and watch what a real pro does. After a while with this particular game, the lack of realism of the racing model. You don’t really need to care about traction or managing weight transfer here so in the end it really is a much simpler game.
I have a few more quibbles about how this game could be improved. The city locations for example look really good but the banners and billboards in them all show the same few brands and that really spoils the esthetics. Another problem is that there is very little documentation about how things work. There is a flashback system for example but no tutorial for how it works and I never used it at all. Systems like giving orders to teammates seem just as pointless as the teammates themselves. The Nemesis system is I think meant to punish the player for being overly aggressive with AI drivers. They seem to actually go faster once that is activated and it can activate even when they are the ones who ram into you from behind. An easy way to bypass all this is just do the time trial on every track so you get the first starting position. After that it’s much easier to keep ahead of everyone and bother with interacting with the AI drivers at all. Finally I never bought any of the DLCs but I note that although you don’t get access to the season events without them, you can still select the tracks in them for free play mode. It’s neat to be able to see the Paris tracks in this way for example without needing to buy it.
Anyway misgivings and limitations aside, I had a lot of fun with this, especially now that I have a racing wheel. The game looks and sounds really good and once again I appreciate that they’ve toned down the edginess to emphasize the motorsports aspect. The obvious question at this point is whether I should graduate to the more realistic games such as Assetto Corsa Competizione or iRacing and the answer is probably not. I’m not that fanatical about them and I’d rather stick with rallying games for now. I may even pick up Forza Horizon 5 after it drops in price despite its extreme silliness.
