I haven't done one of these in a while, so bear with me as I get my bearings in order...
GRID 1, to be known as Race Driver: GRID outside of the US, is a simu-cade racer that defied either designation and instead became it's own thing. It was hated, and it was loved. I am a member of the latter. The racing was dynamic, even without practice sessions for new tracks, the AI was slightly intuitive, in that it wouldn't stay on it's rails and was subject to mistakes and mishaps of it's own creation. The tracks were mostly good, a few bad eggs but nothing major, and while the cars in a given class could be together, they never felt like copy-pasted cars, each having some independent feel. Damage modeling exacerbated this from time to time, and then there was the Demolition Derbys, possibly the best way to lighten the mood.
So now, five years down the pipe we get GRID 2, to be known as Race Driver: GRID 2 worldwide so as to slow confusion I guess, and as it turns out it is a solid game in it's own right. Doesn't mean it's good, but it's solid.
Hmm? Explain this heresy? Easy, Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3, or even ME1 to ME2. If that fails, MGS. Ohhh, you meant the not good bit. Well alright then, I guess that's why you're here.
GRID 2 starts with a decent sized hiccup. You are thrown into a race with no forewarning. Now some will recall that GRID 1 also does this, and that would be correct. However, one very important change has occurred from 1 to 2, the physics engine. They can do whatever witchcraft they want with the ABS and TC, but sending the car into a drift/slide/powerslide at will was something GRID 1 excelled at, mainly because a light drift was easy to obtain by simply turning without power. In GRID 2, however, this ability has been wiped away, and drifting now requires throwing the car into the corner and praying it starts to slide before you hit the wall. Once it does, though, you have to jam the gas to move forward or else you will still hit the wall. This isn't helped by cars whom, in a bid to be more separate from the others, can either be too sluggish or too nimble and tracks that can either drop out from under you, causing any input to cease it's effect, or become a landing pad in places, which will send you car careening to whichever wall you're front wheels were turned towards.
Flashbacks are here again, but unlike GRID 1 or DiRT 3, which allowed you to freely move it back to whatever millisecond you pleased, it now automatically goes back, sometimes a long way, and you have to guess where you want to rejoin the action. If you don't decide, though, you go all the way back to the start of the flashback, at which point if you aren't paying attention, you get a nasty surprise when the game suddenly stops and presses play again whether you're ready or not. You get 5 on normal difficulty, not sure about the others but I don't intend to find out in the immediate future.
Anyway, once you win the race, another new development as in GRID 1 all you had to do was finish, and now you are taken to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a test session. Set a fast enough time here, you're annoying crew chief will give you a poor indication of how good the lap is, and you get to listen to an investor who wants to make a World Series of Racing, the WSR, and you to lead the charge on the track. Now, I actually do like this premise, and this leads to the ESPN malarkey we had seen in some of the promotion stuff leading up to release. If this were to happen in real life, I would be all over it, so the story intrigued me...
Right up to the moment when it stopped being a story. the Season 2-Season 3 SportsCenter transition. From this point on, the HD respray of GRID 1 starts to get thin, and after Season 3 the HD polish begins to fail altogether. The idea is that eight different racing clubs in the world are the best at different disciplines of racing. Here we begin to have an issue, as there are closed circuit races, as expected both city and traditional, and now point-to-point races that take place on tight highways, usually with hidden tight turns ready to kill your car. The disciplines are, in rough order: standard racing, face-off, time attack, elimination, drifting, checkpoint, and touge. Notice that's only seven, two clubs focus on traditional racing, one does it with street cars, one with touring cars. By Season 4, you have already accessed all of them and proceed to WSR events for the rest of the game, all involving one of the disciplines.
Details are as follows: Traditional/pure racing is going from start to finish, trying to be first, either on a circuit or going from A to B. Face-offs are one-on-one race tournaments that otherwise are the same idea, get to the line first. Time attack is what you'd expect, run you're fastest lap, be it circuit or point-to-point, but be warned that the latter is a solo run, the former will give you more chances. Eliminations are what they were in DiRT 3 and the abomination called Showdown, Circuit only, standing start with a grace period, then last is eliminated at regular intervals unless someone crashes out, which rarely happens. Then beat on the Touring car drivers. In Asia, drifting leads off, slide around corners racking up points, PTP only, uses a very small section, and one go-round. Next is checkpoint, set-up like time attack, each checkpoint gives you more time to keep going, go the furthest. Finally touge, it's a clean face-off but you face the same guy each time and it's best of three and only very light contact is allowed, noticeable will get an automatic DQ, another change from GRID 1.
Now we get to the problems. At about season 3, the crew chief, if he can be called that as he and you are the only known crew, and Patrick Callahan, the guy with the vision, will probably start grating on you're nerves, what with Captain Obviously-an-Idiot's constant henpecking and Pat's constant reminders that you can do extra stuff like endurance races, which use liveroutes, a constantly changing track that you will learn to despise, that have a time limit, and overtake events in which the students from the local nursing home have been given big 4X4 trucks to go around the track in and you have to pass them, another event you'll loathe by the time you're done. No worries, though. you can turn them off in the menus and still get the important bits.
The next few have early niggling annoyances at the start, but become full blown problems from the season 3 WSR on. Various tracks have medians, expected when in cities to a point, but instead of white and red stripes at the ends of them, they are all black and yellow. Now in Dubai, where most everything is bright, it's fine, but Paris, Barcelona, and Chicago can be rather dark in places, so it becomes a problem. Another is the fact that you are randomly placed on the grid, no higher than 5th in a standard race, highly annoying when you're primary competition starts in 1st or 2nd. Still, not big ones when the "New" starts falling away to reveal that problems in GRID 1 have been carried over despite five years separation.
The AI is actually worse than GRID 1's, in that it doesn't recognize the player, it doesn't make mistakes aside from the 4X4s mentioned earlier, it has no real self-preservation tendencies, and possibly worst of all, rubberband AI returns WITH A VENGENCE! Early on, you notice that the leader can pull away from everyone easily. At the time it makes sense though as you are still racing the lackeys. By Season 4, the lackeys are mostly gone, and yet it gets worse because Lightweights are introduced. These cars, consisting of the BAC Mono, Ariel Atom, KTM X-bow R, and a Caterham/Lola somethingorother, kill the other classes. They cannot be equaled, but if you're in one you don't expect for the guy to hit a wall, roll over, be a mile behind, THEN come flying up behind you like he was on a rail with a rocket. But THAT'S not the worst. In season 5, you have the hypercars Top Gear loves to ogle, but in a race you have to pick the right one. Why? Because if you don't, your two main competitors will be so far out in front that you have to be absolutely perfect to catch them. Passing them may be another issue, but there's a good chance it won't matter because the AI issues are magnified because the game has a nasty tendency to put you in the rear quarter of the field regularly. Good luck fighting through the moving mass, and you have to fight because if you don't the leader will already be boarding his flight by the time you cross the line.
I should also address that thought of," Well, the leader specializes in this so I expect him to rock it." This is rarely the case. In my experience, it moves between the Touring car leader and the two American club leaders, with the others playing spoil-sport when they damn well want to. Did I mention Tier 4? It's horrible. All the cars a hideously overpowered, and half won't maneuver well enough for you to compensate, effectively cutting the nuts off of the whole thing.
There is a livery editor, limited, but still expanded over what was in GRID 1. There are also small details that do liven up the early game, a small Ravenwest toy car on a shelf and you're name actually integrated into the cutscenes, but not enough to feel anything really.
Then there is the parallel. GRID 2's Online. It has a global challenge deal that no one really deals with, a rivals option that requires you care about the Racenet operation. Obviously there's racing, and all the races in single player are available to you online as well, but some things are limited by the level system, which has no real visual cues aside from the red invading a gray box. Customization comes over to online as well, but you have to level up before you can buy cars and liveries and some paint finishes. You start with one car for each of the first three classes, and are loaned one for T4 races. One thing exclusive to online is that you can buy upgrades for you're cars as well. They do nothing visually, but they do change how the car handles, reacts, accelerates, etc. Happily, overtake events aren't here, but the public lobbies are still full of morons who like nothing more than to ruin you're night by crashing into you at every opportunity.
In conclusion, I have to ask "What happened?". As it is, it is a very solid game, and something incredible, possibly an epic, could have come out of this. But instead, we get something that caters to the thick-headed who won't give it the time of day anyway, in the process shunning those who wanted more of what we already had. Like I said in the blurb up top, it feels like the whole thing came apart mid-way through. Maybe it did in development as well, but we'll never really know, and I'm not sure if I'd care. Rent it, enjoy the early career, then take it back and never try it again.