Race Driver: GRID (PC)

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

While racing, players can choose between several points of view, including dashboard, first-person (in-car), headlight, and two third person perspectives that show off your car and all its glory. You can also up the stakes during race setup by locking yourself to the in-car camera, turning off driver assists like traction control and automatic transmission, or increasing the difficulty level.

As far as the speed in concerned, the developers at Codemasters made sure players felt every bit of the 150+ MPH that the game's cars are capable of reaching. In a nutshell, the racing in GRID is frantic, fast paced, and above all fun. As enjoyable as the racing is, crashing is equally satisfying as the game sports a full crash engine, allowing cars to take on "realistic" damage. Coupled with the game's physics engine, players will experience splintering fibers, impressive spark trails, shattered glass fragments, and mangled steel, all in breathtaking real-time.

Crashing is almost unavoidable, with rather aggressive AI opponents, and if you leave the track you can forget about maintaining speed or steering. When that happens, your best course of action may be to consult the instant replay. Codemasters provides an intuitive instant replay feature that allows you to survey the damage, as well as rewind the action and replay the impact from multiple viewpoints. The following video shows off this feature, as well as the brilliant audio sampling that makes the action come to life.

Click to view Movie (3.4MB)

Coupled with the instant replay feature is what golfers refer to as a mulligan. During each race, players are given the opportunity to correct mistakes that may otherwise end a race prematurely. This feature is called Flashback. After a deadly crash or loss of control, players can choose to rewind the action and restart shortly before things went south. This is useful as even moderate damage can hinder your ability to control your car properly - for example, damage to your car's steering column after a wreck that doesn't necessarily take you out of a race may cause your car to pull to the right or left, thus killing your chances of winning the race or the desire to simply continue on.

Flashback is designed to keeps players in the game after an unfortunate spill on the race track. While this may be seen as a helpful feature to some, others may view it as a means to cheat their way to victory. For those whose opinions represent the latter, GRID offers a Pro difficulty mode that disables the Flashback feature.  Players may also choose to limit the number of Flashbacks on standard diffuculty.