"feather-throttle-not-hair" (feather-throttle-not-hair)
08/14/2013 at 15:56 • Filed to: games
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"feather-throttle-not-hair" (feather-throttle-not-hair)
08/14/2013 at 15:56 • Filed to: games | 1
| 2 |
Yeah, this game came out a few months ago. I originally published this review to my blog, but i thought I'd share it with you guys too, just in case someone is thinking about buying it.
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The first Grid game was a nice little racing title and I recently purchased the sequel to see how it stacks up to its predecessor. I'm a pretty big fan of console racing sims such as Gran Turismo and Forza . At the same time I can get into and enjoy more casual racing games such as the Need for Speed series or Burnout . Grid 2 nicely intersects these two genres feeling at times both simmy and arcadey.
The second installment of the Grid series takes players on a tour of various racing series' with a slick interface and lots of hand holding. This is both good and bad. It feels very polished with a strange disembodied ghost-voice telling the player where to go and what to do. At the same time, it feels awfully restricting. The game will let you stray from it's chosen path but it sure wont be happy about it. A good example of this was my total inability to find a simple practice mode available for all of the tracks. I had to settle for a 1 on 1 race with an opponent set on "very easy" in order to practice on certain courses.
The game runs beautifully on my PC making me realize just how old my PS3 and Xbox 360 are. Graphical effects are pretty and crash the cars enough and they begin to disintegrate in interesting ways. Entire front fenders can be dislodged. Of particular note, are the absolutely gorgeous sound effects in this game which rival anything I've ever heard coming from a racing game. Various pops and backfires sound great, the rev-limiter sounds perfect and driving next to a cliff or a wall produces an appropriate echo. The game just has extremely high levels of fit and finish in the graphics and sound departments.
The physics are more of a mixed bag. This game is NOT a simulation, cars take corners much faster than they have any right to. Setting up a good clean line with a minimum of tire scrub will not net the fastest lap times, a much better strategy is to attack every corner like a hero with lots of tire smoke, while avoiding understeer like the plague. Slide that rear end out, because it'll only make you go faster. Until you spin of course. Balancing this arcadeyness is a surprisingly complex physics engine. There is a very real feeling of weight transfer that really effects the way the game is played. The handling model is nice and consistent and once you learn the rules, there's a lot of fun to be had experimenting and playing within them. The game feels like it's exaggerating real life physics, rather than throwing them out the window entirely.
And Grid 2 is challenging. I originally set the difficulty up to maximum and was immediately destroyed. I turned it down to "hard" which worked well for a while until I hit a certain type of race, at which point I was once again utterly destroyed. Now i'm playing the game on "normal." Who knows, maybe i'll eventually end up switching to easy just to complete my steady march of shame. It's generally the good type of difficulty though, I always feel like I could go faster or do better after every race.
The races feature a huge amount of variety, rarely are they a straight up race. This is another one of those things that can either be annoying or a boon. It's harder to get bored, but there are a couple of modes that are frustrating. There are also a couple of modes that feature about 30 seconds of driving, not in it's self a bad thing, but somewhat annoying when you have to stare at 30 seconds of loading screen on either side of the race.
Grid 2 also earns a special gold star in my heart for it's track design. There are some standard real world race courses, but much of the game takes place in cities or in the countryside. These tracks would more accurately be described as maps, as they each feature multiple layouts that only sometimes repeat each other. The four countryside maps each feature at least one six plus mile point to point race, which is very cool in my opinion. The city maps also feature a cool trick: there is a game mode where the course actually changes it's layout every lap, a very cool innovation to keep players on their toes.
Grid 2 is a good game. It's not without it's frustrations, but on a very fundamental level it's evident that a lot of hard work and love went into it's creation. If you're into cars but dont care about absolute realism, the game is a blast. If you just want to go fast, the game caters to that as well. It will really only disappoint those who must have realism at all costs or those who want to play in a sandbox. Otherwise the polish and the grins are just too hard to ignore.
Shady Balkan Subject, Drives an Alfa
> feather-throttle-not-hair
08/14/2013 at 16:08 |
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Biggest disappointment this year for me. Here is what I tought about the game. I stopped playing midway through the game. For comparison I played the wole original twice and two more to different stages of completion.
http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/oppo-do-you-pl…
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Z_Stig
> feather-throttle-not-hair
08/14/2013 at 18:05 |
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I really enjoyed the first Grid, and before that I played TOCA 3. But Codemasters' latest offerings are terrible.