Grid is purely and simply a racing game of the highest quality. It is not cluttered by irritating cut-scenes that take you away from the action: there is no feeble, cliché packed external storyline. You create your own narrative, building your career by virtue of your performance. You start at rock bottom with an old car and a basic garage, and you progress by winning races, earning money and getting noticed. Put together some impressive performances and the big boys will come knocking on your door. Being hired by a major team gives you the opportunity to quickly accumulate the cash you will need to setup your own team. This is where it gets really interesting. You’ll be buying your own cars, securing big money sponsorships and taking on a second driver. Your garage has a 3D menu, which takes you through the game.
The racing takes place in three parts of the world: Europe, USA and Japan. Each region has its own, very different type of racing and its own makes of car.
In Europe the action mostly takes place on well known race tracks, including Le Mans (a 24 hour race which you will complete in 24 minutes). You can get to drive the brand of car you dream about, including Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Ferrari. How cool is that!
In the USA you’ll be hurtling through the streets of major cities, at ultra high speed, in red hot super cars such as the Dodge Viper SRT-10.
In Japan you’ll need to modify your driving style to cope with their favoured mode of racing. Drift and down hill racing requires deft hands and fine throttle control.
Your AI opponents are gorgeously realistic. They don’t negotiate the track with a boring, robotic efficiency; they make mistakes and suffer tyre blowouts! In edition to single player mode, Xbox Live allows up to twelve online players.
The graphics are superb. Particularly impressive is the way in which the developers have captured the crowd excitement, a feature that has been missing from many racing games. Grid pulls this off by having very large and responsive crowds of 40000-50000.
The developers of Grid set out to give us a top class, realistic racing experience. They seem to have succeeded.