A million times the Demo for GRID was downloaded on the Xbox Live Marketplace, wow, thats a lot considering this is a new venture for Codemasters. What was liked about that demo was the pure thrill of having full damage control and the brilliant graphics that are on display.

Playing the full game has shown me a few things or two about my skill as a driver compared to playing Project Gotham Racing 4, in GRID you have to be perfect in driving round every corner, watching every drivers move and be skillful in what you want to do in your career. After 30 minutes i was ready to give up as it was really hard for me to keep control of the car but i was hooked on trying to perfect my driving abilities.

Lets start with the gameplay, when you start GRID you have to enter your driver information which in turn allows you to select a name that the “AI Announcer” calls you during the game which is a great personal touch to the game. Much like DiRT you are given full explanations of the menus when in the career mode and even the loading screens are interesting showing you your statistics so far and your achievements to boot!

Graphically GRiD is the best driving game out on any console! even better than Gran Tourismo 5:Prologue. The detail on the cars is awesome and the scenery is out of this world. The design of the tracks are challenging and requires you to think long and hard before you try to coast your way around the track

You have a selection of 45 cars and they are separated over 3 regions. USA, Europe and Japan. The differences in performance in each of the 3 regions are major. In USA you have the muscle built cars which are speedy and the European cars are like the average style but the Japanese cars are fantastic as they are driftier and are more powerful! In that region you get to do drift races and the tracks are that narrow on mistake and your either turned 180° or have enough damage to stop you from racing. As you prgress through GRiD you have the opportunites to win trophies and exclusive Sponsorship deals that give you more money to spend on cars, and that is easier said than done.

In terms of the Damage aspect of GRiD, Codemasters have made this game so hard for you if you crash your car. Make one big crash and you will lose your suspension and your handling of the car will border undriveable, its not just the damage from the cars that make GRiD interesting, the new ‘Flashback’ option gives you the opportunity once you have crashed in a bad way to rewind the game up to a certain point and restart from there. Although i would like to mention that you only get a certain amount respective of what options you turn on in the race mode.

The options in GRiD are vital for your career to flourish as you get reputation points per race and you get more points for changing things in the options mode. These could be as simple as turning Brake Assist off, Traction Control off or Steering Control. The difficulties will have a huge impact on your reputation points aswell of which the difficulites on offer are punishing as you choose the higher tier. If you want a proper racing experience then turning the flashback option and turning the restart race one is the way to go foward.

Its just a case of getting use to the races courses and cars as i found it hard in career mode to get use to the handling of them. Although you get bonus objectives for coming in a certain place i found myself struggling and having to restart the race over and over again. So my advice, is to practice in the exibition mode first and then go back to career.

In terms of multiplayer, i found myself wondering where the split screen option was and i then found out that there isnt one! How rude is that! The Xbox Live will have to do.

In Xbox Live you can have up to 12 racers online and you can rank up as you play more races, which is quite neat although i found a lot of gamers not racing but trying to just crash into you which ticked me off and a lot of other people.

There are only a few gripes with this game and the main one being that i wish there were more cars in the game, 45 isnt near enough although potentially we could see DLC packs with more. The other bad point of this game is the no inclusion of a split screen mode.

Verdict

Longevity: 8

Graphics: 10

Gameplay: 8.7

Sound: 9

Overall 8.6 “A must buy for any serious driver out there”

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