Race Driver Grid: First impressions

Wednesday 14 May 2008

So, For a start, it seems like the race driver series has dropped it's TOCA name tag. This pleases me, as I've hated everything TOCA branded since the series emerged on the PS one.
From the start, it looked promising. It asked me to Enter my name and country. After entering my name, it greeted me. That was awesome/Weird. "Hello Jake" it said, sounding almost natural, and prompting a desire to go back and call my self cockfuctus as an experiment.

It called me Clive. Which says alot about anyone named Clive really. The menu was pretty nice, even though the music was fucking irritating, and i easily found myself on the "Grid World" screen, Contemplating different driver offers, with separate bonuses. I took the contract with Span-K racing, Firstly because it reads as Spank Racing, and secondly, because that's gotta be cooler then the ominous sounding "Team Orange". It put on another options screen "JUST LET ME PLAY" I was thinking, eager to escape the options music, but generally i found the experience alot slicker and easier then the last game I talked about, Operation Darkness.

So you can imagine my surprise, and disdain when the game crashed on the loading screen, and It looked like I'd have to brave the stupidly irritating menu music again. Turns out Xbox live had gone down the exact instant I tried to load.

I put my game face on and undeterred, headed back to the game, this time settling for the bad ass nickname of "Ace". The graphics were brilliant but the driving was a little twitchy, and I immediately wrote off my car, hitting a wall at 94 MPH according to the friendly stats screen when you crash. this happened a great many more times as I adjusted to the driving, and then the game crashed again, so i decided to call it a day, being suitably unimpressed thus far, and royally irritated by the games announcer and the options music.

So, experience over, what did I think? I thought it was a pretty decent game, Even if the handling was twitchier then a 4 yr old on speed, and it looked pretty. I also really like the Flashback system, where after you screw up a race, you can go back to any point in the reply and start playing from there, which is a really nice idea for a racing game. All in all, i think I'll check out the reviews of GRID but I don't think I'll be purchasing it.

Labels: First impressions, GRID, Xbox360

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Article Posted: Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 16:26.
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