GRID Impressions by yours truly

I felt I needed to write a small summary about Grid since I promised you guys a review and some of you were looking forward to it. I have guests out the ying-yang at my house and I've been real busy. This summary is a quick little project so forgive me if it feels short.

My settings: 8600 ddr2 overclocked to 600/1300/500. Everything on except mirrors and wind, everything else at high with shadows on medium at 1440 x 900 and am averaging 25 fps.



First thing is the controls. It seems the default controller settings have been modified a good amount and the cars handle alot much better than in the demo. Of course the controller settings are pretty detailed so you can modify the controls to match your style of racing. I have the logitech g35 wheel but I just wanted to say that playing with the keyboard while not as immersive, still does not take away from the fun factor of this game.

The visuals in this game are great. If you haven't seen grid in action your missing out on a visual feast for the eyes. This game is stunning, STUNNING! Cars, tracks, and the environment in general are fantastic. Codemasters new EGO engine seems to be a winner and well optimized since the visuals are even better than dirt while providing much better performance. The realisitic car damange models vary from slight but noticeable scrapes and scratches to losing spoilers and bumpers. You can even demolish your car to the point that is completely demolished. The audio in this game is no slouch either. Crashes sound realisitc while engines sound distinct for each car. I recommend not disabling motion blur which smoothes out the drops in fps and also gives that real sense of speed (believe me, this game gives you a sense of speed). While the game looks fantastic and plays great due to the motion blur even when hovering in the low 20s. I would recommend at least 25 and more around 30 to really get that sense of speed. While the game looks fantastic you can reduce some of the quality options to medium without sacrifing great visual quality besides, when your screaming down the track at speeds of 190 MPH you won't have time to notice some minor details.



One word that summarizes the gameplay in Grid is variety. There are so many different types of cars from muscle, drift, F1, le mans, and even prototypes. The types of matches even vary from racing, drifting, derby (sweeeet) and much more. In Grid you feel like you've never raced the same race twice. With the variety of tracks, cars, and types of race you do the math, its never a dull moment. The games career mode is interesting. You begin by racing for other teams earninig money until you have enough to start your own team. Depending on how well you do you earn reputation for yourself and your team. As you move up the ladder you being earning the real cash and get yourself into badder beasts.



Grid is also unique that it tries to achieve a great balance between arcade and simluation and attempts to appeal to a broader range of audience. This can be either be a good or bad thing. Some hardcore fans might feel this to be too light. With a meager (but fantastic) selection of 45 cars and no real tweaking you can do under the hood. While for the casual fans it might seem a little too realistic especailly with some of the unforgiving AI. The AI in this game is no joke, they are agressive and often even play dirty (often returning the favor). For some casual racers often in racing one mistake often ruins the entire race and frustrates the gamer. Codies have resolved this issue by creating the instant replay features. It lets you rewind the last 15 secs or so of the race when activated and allows you to choose the exact second when to reattempt the race. Dont worry hardcorore fans, you can enable pro mode on races which disables this feature as well as the option of restarting races and your rewarded with more cash and rep.



Overall Grid was exactly what I was looking forward to. I recommend it highly for anyone remotely interested in racing. I am looking forward to tearing it up online once I have some free time. I hoped this helped guys, sorry I couldn't get a full review done. See you the track!!



Next month I should be free to do a review or two. Alone in the dark anyone?

Feel free to leave any questions or comments about anything that I haven't adressed.

 

i Played the Demo and i loved it, gonna buy it tomorrow, but i'm 2$ short, gonna go "borrow" them from my brothers Wallet ^^

 

Whats the idea behind this? NFS Underground or TOCA?

 

Hey Guys, what are the max settings you can play it on with good framerates??

 

Well, GRID seems and immense game and one of the best racing game released imo. I mean the graphics.....simply WOW!!
I was thinking that this game could only run decently on an 8800 but seems from your review it runs almost perfectly on an 8600GT DDR2, it might be reconsidering again since it should run on my laptop quite well too seeing that it has a WXGA screen. Anybody back me up on this regard? - I don't want be buying the game and ending up playing it on low/medium.

AND BTW, forgot to say but good review!!

 

Nice "mini-review"! I might buy this once I'm done with school. Maybe.

 

Looks cool Motion blur looks very good. Don't think it will play very well on my 8400m GT..

@forerunner: This page is huge Hate using the scrollbar

 

I can give you a loan. Don't pay up and I'll find you.

I'd say a nice mix between the two. Well simply put its racing mechanics are leaning toward the simulation style but the features and lack of customization make it more of a pick up style casual gameplay.

You have to be more specific with your hardware. But as I said the ddr2 runs it fine. Mind that I have mine pretty highly overclocked but I also have it 1440 x 900. You can bump down the res a bit.

Your ddr will run it fine at stock at 1280 x 800 or similar res with mostly high settings. With it overclocked you can run it at mostly high fine. Its pretty optimized. You can download the demo first if your concerned but mind you the retail runs noticeably better. Also you can modify the graphic settings to your liking and optimize it a bit without much loss in visual quality.

Maybe? MAYBE!! I want to be running circles around you online when your done with school. You better get it.

 

this game is awesome. I love the realism. Its so hard to beat unlike NFS which I find too easy.

 

Ah right, that seems job done then!! I was previously going to get Test Drive Unlimited but GRID demolishes it in every department. Tbh, from the trailors and videos on youtube, no need to download the demo since I'm sure it's a fantastic game.

Thanks again,
Jam.

Btw, how are you playing it.....keyboard, controller or steering wheel?

 

Thanks for the feedback mate. I will probably have a go .

 

Haha we'll see who will be running circles around who.

 

This game looks impressive, I might have to get it.

 

How is multiplayer?

 

I have to admit, this is one of the best racing games I've played in a while now!

Maybe it's just me, but the arcadey feel with the great graphics, awesome control and great audio, I love these kinds of racing games.

 

Hmmm yeh, how have owners found multiplayer. Is is smooth or is quite annoyingly laggy at times?

 

it was smooth in mostly every match i've ever played

 

Hmm, the car range seems nice, and the fact that the control is better than in the demo might be a plus.
Can you find it on Steam?

 

Good to here!!

 

i got the game on the release date. its not even the price of a full game too which i think is a major plus. its only 39.99. so far im really enjoying the game. im going to go through most of career mode before i hit online.

 

downloading of steam right now

but its on 12%

 

Yup it's released on Steam. $39.99

 

i played the demo but it ran rubbish on my lappy OC'ed at 550/800

 

the full game runs 5FPS better than the demo

 

I'm going to go ahead and say it, Grid is my favorite game of all time.

I'm a big racing fan, FM2, GT5 , GTR2 are all good sims, but Grid is just plain fun. And it looks fantastic on my desktop too!

I bought it for both PC and 360. Gotta have it for Xbox Live with the friends.

 

Yeah, I know I just love the sense of speed in this game. Exhilarating!

 

very realistic, when you are going 180mph you know that you are not going at 120mph. it's also very rewarding when you finish one race, in my case. yes finish the race, not which place i got

 

ive got the full game today, its just any racers dream! the multiplayer is stunning!

 

I think you need to update some stuff, because it runs smooth on my laptop and mine is not even as fast as you.

AMD Turion 2.0
1gig Ram
x1600 ATI 256DDR

But yea what sold me on getting this game is how smooth it ran and how good it look, plus I wanted a good racing game that allows you to race at the mountains in japan. O does anyone knows how to record replays? Do they have a program for that in the game or do I have to use fraps?

 

I will have to write a code to play this game with a wii controller and add it to your mini review with a video of it in action.

 

I thought the Demo looked brilliant, but these kinds of games are way way way way way too hard for me to play. I was never able to get past the first turn in any of the tracks without crashing.

Racing games and I don't mix well, but cool review. Also, Forerunner, I find shorter reviews like this are better and more fun to read than really really really long feature lists that show up on review sites like Gamespot. Then again, if you enjoy writing a bunch then just keep on truckin with your writeups!

Good job.

 

That would be awesome.

Thanks buddy. I think why it was so hard was because of the somehwat terrible default controller settings. With some minor changes it really becomes really easy to fit to your style.

 

Same with me actually. I haven't OC'd and still have default drivers but apart from the codemasters intro, the rest (i.e menu and saving) was incredibly slow.....at about 10FPS.
I've uninstalled it, going to get some modded drivers (169.04 should do I think) and re-install. The only niggle during installation was that kaspersky thought it found a worm in OpenAL(???). Wonder if that didn't fully complete the installation. Hmm.

 

How is multi player? A lot of people?

 

yup a bunch of people are playing the multiplayer. all Kind of tracks , but very few people are playing dirty like if someone was infront of you in the begging of the race , when the race starts they just reverse on you killing your front wheels which pretty much ends your race xD

 

Ok guys I just got to the Lemans 24hrs race and is it me or my car is hella slow compare to others? It is one long race, the whole 24 minutes of it, I got to 6hrs left and spun out and I had no flashback to spare... :[