I’ve been a big fan of racing games for a long time. I spent many happy hours in high school running my friends into the supernaturally solid shrubs and lampposts featured in Top Gear. Indeed it was the arcade version of Race Drivin’ that taught me how to use a manual transmission, and I’ve preferred them ever since.

Fast forward to the Playstation and the sudden arrival of Gran Turismo. The dedicated car-otaku at Polyphony Digital took the bold step of pursuing realism in a racing game, recreating not only the shapes of the cars, but also their distinct handling qualities and engine notes. The combination of the beautiful cars and tracks with the rich depth of tuning customization was like chocolate-covered crack to someone like me, and I played nothing else for almost four months.

You see, Gran Turismo (and it’s Xbox successor Forza) are games that love cars. The people who make them love cars. The want you to love cars too, and they try to accomplish this by faithfully recreating every crease, every curve, every engine note and turbo whine. They are devoted to the way that all the distinct elements that make up the car and the track come together in a symphony of noise and velocity conducted by the skillful application of the driver’s right foot. (Or finger, if it’s a game controller; whatever.)

So now here I am playing Grid. Grid confused me a bit initially but after playing for a while I realized that where GT and Forza are in love with cars, Grid is in love with the race. Grid doesn’t want you running endless laps around the Nurburgring to test your suspension settings; you just buy a car, get in, and GO. Grid is all about the racing: anything that doesn’t involve going really fast and making lots of noise has been surgically removed. You don’t even get a tutorial or opportunity to buy your first car, the game does it for you. You’re in a car on a track doing 100mph within 30 seconds of turning your Xbox on, and it doesn’t slow down from there.

Having limited its scope in this way, Grid has room to include lots of other stuff, and what that mostly consists of is just about every type of auto racing that happens on pavement. The game is divided into three regions; USA, Europe, and Japan. Each has its own distinct character, both in the types of races that occur there and in the way the AI racers behave.

The American muscle and demolition races are fast, a bit dirty, and full of wrecks. The European races include Le Mans and open-wheel racing, and are very precise and have little margin for error. (I actually found this to be the hardest region to race in.) The Japanese races are all very idiosyncratic and fun, featuring Touge races on twisty mountain roads and drifting competitions as well as more standard races.

Rating:

Playtime: till you get bored

Replay value: Very High

Favorite Racetype: Drift GP

Favorite Car: Skyline GT-R Z-type

The AI is another really shining element of this game. These are not perfect line-riding robots that you’ll find in a lot of games of this type. They have personalities. They can get aggressive or overcautious and that means they can make mistakes. You may blow a corner and lose three places only to have the new leader spin out on the next turn and take the other guys out with him. All this goes a long way towards eliminating anything that might feel tedious or repetitive, and that’s a nice touch.

In Forza or GT, the main prize for racing are the bonus cars you get for winning, so if you don’t get first place, you might as well start over. This means you spend a lot of time doing the same race over and over again because you screwed up and got passed. Grid eliminates these problems by not having prize cars. Everything is up for sale, and how you place in the race only determines how much money you get. Winning isn’t a do-or-die proposition anymore, and that makes things a lot more fun. Since you don’t get to customize your car, the races are always pretty even, which makes for a lot of really tight, nail-biting races - especially on the higher difficulties.

What you will spend some time on is team management. Grid lets you recruit the quirky AIs and let them drive for your own team. This is important for many team championship events, since you can’t get enough points to win with just one driver. There are a lot of drivers available to hire, and they all have their own character, strengths and weaknesses, and pay requirements.

You also have to recruit sponsors for your team. This is where most of your money will come from, since your sponsorship money will frequently be two or three times as much as the winner’s purse. Early sponsors will throw you a few grand just for finishing the race, but progress through the game will open up more potential sponsors that have deeper wallets and higher expectations.

The most fascinating gameplay option in Grid is the Instant Replay. Most racing games these days let you watch replays, especially slow-motion replays of your big wrecks, and Grid’s very realistic approach to car damage can make these wrecks spectacular. The nifty thing is that you can activate the Instant Replay option during a race to rewind back to a point where things started to go wrong, then restart the game from there and not do it that way.

I can’t tell you how much frustration this alleviates when you’ve just accidentally under-braked on the last hairpin of the last lap of a 10 lap race and watched five cars whiz past while you’re getting out of the sand. Most games make you Redo From Start, but Grid lets you back up just enough to try it again. The number of Replays you get is limited by the difficulty level you select, and you get bonus money for not using them, so there is a big incentive to run the race cleanly on your own.

All in all, Grid is a fabulous game to just pick up and go nuts with, but there are a few flies in the pudding. The online functionality is not particularly well-developed, and the number of available gametypes is pretty limited. The selection of cars is also limited, and there’s no customization of any kind. If you don’t like the way a car handles, you have to try a different one instead. You don’t have a lot of options for team paint schemes, either. Although the cars are very visually distinct and detailed, the sound effects are pretty generic, to the point where it’s difficult to distinguish the engine note of the Viper V10 behind you from your own Nissan straight-6. Also, there’s no excuse for having a Replay system this awesome and not giving you the ability to save replays to your hard drive to share later.

Grid has a fairly steep learning curve. The damage model is brutal, and hitting the crash barriers too hard can take you straight out of the race with a cracked block. Worse is the track mini-map, which is zoomed in so far that it doesn’t show you any farther down the track than you can see anyway. You don’t have the option of turning on a racing-line display, all of which makes learning unfamiliar tracks a punishing affair.

In the end, I think Grid misses the mark a bit. It’s a really great single-player experience, but online is where it’s at for racing games, and Grid is just too weak there. The complete lack of customization will alienate a lot of potential players. Grid is really a casual racer, for people who want to just jump in and race for a while, and move on. In that respect it succeeds, and I certainly won’t stop playing it anytime soon.