Consolation Prize

A demo of the forthcoming racing game Racedriver: GRID, the next game from Codemasters, the developers behind the really rather good off-road racing game DiRT, is now available to download from both Xbox Live Marketplace (795mb) and Sony Playstation Network (962mb).

The demo offers up a few juicy morsels of racing action. “Grid World” looks like the main single player experience as you pick and choose from driver offers which will reward the player with both money and a number of reputation points. Each offer also has a bonus condition (team objective), for example finish no lower than third to get an extra £1000. The three driver offers available provide a good example of the diverse racing that may be available in GRID and the game mixes things up nicely with some touring car racing at the Jarama Grand Prix circuit in Spain, drift racing around the docks in Yokohama, Japan, and finally partaking in a pro muscle car series event on the streets of San Francisco.

The racing is intense and I found the “normal” difficulty to be adequate for my limited driving skills, especially when your trading scrapes and blows with some pretty aggressive AI. As with DiRT there’s full on damage modelling, steam into a corner and miscalculate the braking and you’ll find yourself hitting the barriers and inflicting some serious damage drastically effecting the handling of the vehicle. Fortunately GRID adopts a snazzy system to ensure that your race doesn’t entirely go up in smoke. Depending on the difficulty level you’ll have a number of “flashbacks” to use throughout the race which allows the player to rewind to a point before the incident and resume from that position. It’s a simple concept but one that works exceptionally well. Why replay the entire race when you can just rewind to the point before the mistake and try again? Brilliant! I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve misjudged a corner on the last lap, or had a lapse of concentration, and thus lost a race over the years.

At the start of the demo you’re asked to choose the first name and surname of the driver as-well as choosing the audio name (or nickname) which you’ll be referred to. During the race the team will constantly keep you upto date with driver positions and sometimes lend a bit of encouragement or even praise for a decent overtaking maneuver. The information is generally quite useful but also adds to the feeling of realism and further immerses the player in the game.

I was very impressed with the opponent AI and to see that it’s not infallible. There are still too many racing games around where the AI racers follow each other nose-to-tail and don’t deviate from the racing line. In GRID however the AI opponents happily tussled with one-another and on occasion made a critical mistake which resulted in the loss of position or even retirement.

Finally it must be mentioned that this game looks great and runs very smoothly even when there are 20 cars on the grid. The presentation is top notch with some slick menu screens throughout the demo accompanied by a rather nice ambient music track. I really enjoyed DiRT and on the strength of this demo I’m very much looking forward to the variety of racing that Racedriver: GRID promises to deliver.

I’m not a fan of racing fames, but I know a lot of people are liking this demo.