Don’t worry – having acclimatised I loved the feel, and it all adds to that sense of reckless racing that makes GRID such a thriller on the track. The last racing game I played in depth was GT5: Prologue, and the cars in GRID feel noticeably lighter and more bouncy on the tarmac, and more inclined to slide out if you’re too aggressive with the accelerator or the brake. You’ll be using it for a while, because the handling takes a little getting used to. In other words, it’s cool and not at all a game breaker. And if you keep on crashing, you’ll eventually run out of second chances. At the same time, you can only use Flashback a specific number of times, so while it will save your bacon at a crucial moment, you can’t employ it willy-nilly just because you’re sure you could have taken that corner slightly faster. No longer do you have to play it safe just because a risky manoeuvre could ruin your entire race. No longer will a bad move from an AI or a stupid mistake on the last of five laps leave you spitting and swearing at the screen in disbelief. It’s a bit like the ‘sands of time’ from Prince of Persia, but fitted to a racing game, and it works like a treat. Use the controls to zip forwards and backwards through a brief stretch of footage, find a good spot, whack the Flashback button, and within a moment you’ll be back on the track, doing whatever you need to in order to avoid whatever disastrous combination of events wrecked your race. And when I say instant, I mean just a few seconds’ pause at most. Take a bad corner on the final lap, spin off the track, write off your car or get blasted into a barrier by an over-zealous rival, and a simple press of a button puts you in an instant-replay mode. With it, the difficulty level is just about right. Without it, all the carnage and aggression on the track would make the game unbearably frustrating. The key is GRID’s most ingenious trick: a little feature called Flashback. The result of this isn’t to make you feel cowed or useless on the track – it’s to give the racing a sense of risk, reward and danger that even the awesome PGR4 can’t match. The old bumper cars routine, still clearly visible in GT5: Prologue, won’t cut any ice here. What’s more, GRID’s realistic approach to car damage really does make you think twice about simply bullying your way through the pack or taking every corner with reckless abandon. The competition is fierce, and even in the early stages on the easiest difficulty levels, you won’t be able to guarantee a win without some good driving or a little extra help (more of that later). No, these sons of guns will try to block you, bash into you, and even knock you out of the way while trying to pull off some fearsome overtaking manoeuvres of their own. The tracks are packed with up to 20 racers, and each one of them is driven by an AI that won’t just sit on the racing line and wave cheerfully as you overtake. GRID still scores where TOCA always scored: the racing. It’s not just comparable to the likes of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Forza 2 and Project Gotham Racing 4 – it’s actually a better game in some respects.Īs with last year’s Colin McRae: DIRT, Codemasters has given GRID a slickness and a suspiciously US-friendly polish, but here there’s no sense that the development team has abandoned the elements that used to make the TOCA series special. I just hope it leaves the ‘underdog’ reputation behind, because GRID deserves to be big. Race Driver: GRID may have left the TOCA name behind, but it’s still full of the same qualities and – importantly – the same attitude that drove its antecedents. The last effort, TOCA Race Driver 3, had its visual issues but offered one of the most authentic and exciting racing experiences on the last generation of consoles. The perennial underdog of the driving game world, Codemasters’ TOCA series won and kept a hardcore fanbase, but never quite achieved the global recognition that the likes of Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing have enjoyed. ”’Platforms: PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 PC PlayStation 3 version reviewed.”’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |