Hands-On Preview: Codemasters' latest will get your engine started.
GRID is adrenaline. Its circuit races are about going fast and still making the hairpin turns. The crowds cheered as I zipped past them and cringed when I bumped the walls near them. My first spins around the track involved a lot of crashing, but as I started to get the hang of things, I felt the rush of adrenaline as I worked to keep up with the other cars, bumping them and pushing into them as I tried to make my way around the curves. One of the circuit tracks is set in San Francisco, with a long straightaway up some of the city's famous hills and the muscle car you drive can easily catch air if you floor it. It feels a little Hollywood with realism sacrificed in the name of excitement, but it works.
GRID's Drift competitions had me scoring points by accelerating into a corner and then pulling the hand brake and turning to slide around the corners. The closer you get to a flag at each corner, the more points it's worth, with more bonuses for strings of good drifts one after another. It takes place in an industrial area, and I really felt at home kicking up clouds of dust and smoke while skidding around piles of crates and oil drums that would be at home in any shooter. The drift competitions aren't races—you go up against another guy for points only, and unlike the circuit races, you won't see him on the track.
GRID is skill. It was tough for a noob like me to keep my BMW 320SI away from the walls, much less on the track, even after an hour or so of practice. The San Francisco track has plenty of ninety degree turns—just the sort of thing to send your car into the wall if you try to take it at too high a speed. The controls are sensitive and the turns are often tight—a small movement to the analog steering stick at high speed can send a car across the track or into the grass. It gets easier with practice, though, and the controls get to feel more and more natural with time. Fortunately, the designers were forgiving and offered a few features to help ease us newcomers into the game. On the one hand, there are plenty of settings that make things simpler, like automatic transmissions, traction control, and help with braking and stability. There's also the lifesaving Flashback feature. If you end up in a race-ending crash, you can rewind things with the help of a set of VCR-like controls and re-enter the race five or ten seconds earlier. It's not a complete freebie, though, since the game tracks how many times you use Flashback. It also tracks other stats like favorite car types, prize money, and miles driven.
GRID is competition. Even in single-player mode, racing against a pack of AI-driven cars, I wanted to win. If I fell behind in a race, watching the pack round corners in the distance pushed me to drive faster and catch up. When I was able to keep up with the pack, jockeying for position and cutting off other drivers in the turns, I wanted more that to just keep up: I wanted to beat them, to move up in the rankings. GRID also offers two flavors of on-line multiplayer. Quick matches provide a lobby where players can meet up and jump right into a game. There's also a mode where a player can create a server, choose a location, race type and so on, and players can come and go as they please. As of this writing, there are plenty of players on servers and in the quick match lobby looking for games.
