As usual, frustrating on PC with a keyboard.
Nothing jaw dropping in the graphics department, but renditions of especially the cities like Paris, Barcelona or Chicago and Hong Kong are very well done, although in the beginning there's little time to appreciate the surroundings since you got your eyes glued to the road or the car(s) in front of you.
What is yet again frustrating is how the cars behave. Like in most racer games I know, your own car seems to be constantly driving on a patch of ice while the A.I. steered opponents are sitting on rails.
Once again, when you hit someone, you're bound to end-up the wrong way around in the barriers while the one you hit doesn't budge and when hit by someone else, well, it's the same story. I wonder why developers find it to be fun to make an overly aggressive A.I. who's only purpose seems to be to annoy and aggravate you.
Besides, thanks to the cars' none existent grip you're almost always all over the place, especially in the later stages when driving high-power cars like the Dodge Viper, Königsegg or even the Bugatti Veyron: they all behave like someone poured lubricant over the tires. There's only one car --in the lot of 55 I garnered so far-- which is manageable on all tracks and that is the Caterham SP 300R...
The off-kilter behaviour --when not due to the A.I.-- is typical of most race games when steering with a keyboard and is also why I usually avoid high speed race games or sims because in the end, the frustration and aggravation outweighs tenfold the pleasure of playing.
The car menu is also something in which not much thought went. They are sitting in "tiers" in small pictures at the bottom of the screen, but not alphabetically, which means you always have to sift through the lot in order to find the one you want for the upcoming race.
I'm not a race-game nut, but I like the occasional spin around a circuit or city. What aggravates me slightly in GRID 2 is the lack of details in the statistics department. While the game loads between races, you're constantly reminded --like, every 3 to 8 minutes-- about how many kilometers/miles you have driven in your career, how many contests you've entered or what the longest drift was so far, but there's no possibility to go have a look at or compare your best times or compare your own times with A.I. competitors.
Races are a lot about statistics and GRID 2 has almost none, besides the obvious ones which you already know. What is being shown in the hud in white lettering also often is washed out by the white of the clouds.
There's opportunities to change your car's appearance by swapping to a different color in a variety of finishes like Gloss or Pearlescent and there's a large number in decals and sponsoring publicity.
Then there's your engineer who sounds like he's fresh from college and who introduces you to your agenda and comments on the available races. The voice is boring and repeats the same stuff over and over, stuff which is mostly highly irrelevant as well. Developers should finally realize that they listen to the comments maybe once or twice, while we, the players, must hear them time after time after time.
The overview of your career could have been done better also. There's no first glance overview of what's available. To see where to race, you need to click the individual menus and go inside 'em to see what challenges remain.
A side menu with everything on display would have worked better instead of this wall with poster-like displays.
But I like the game. Am not going through the roof over it, but it's pretty decent fun, despite the many flaws.
Overall, the game feels like the devs have put in a decent amount of time to get the look of the surroundings and the cars right, but then someone sacked the department responsible for the menus, car behaviour and story-line.
Plus, racing to get more fans is nice, but involving money and adding the ability to buy upgrades could have made things far more interesting.
So, is GRID2 a good game? Yes it is. At least, I like it and will have another go after finishing this "review".
If there's ever to come a GRID3, I hope that by then, Codemasters will have hired a new team to do the statistics and stuff... I like those.
*note: You can change the view of the car while altering colors or decals and stuff, by hitting either the "A" (swivel around the car clock-wise), "D" (swivel around the car anti-clock-wise), "Q" (zoom out), "E" (zoom in), "W" (go up) or "S" (go down) keys on an AZERTY keyboard.
JJ