Codemasters, what happened? A complete disappointment... if you are a huge GRID fan, avoid and savor the memory.
I am a big Codie fan and have had all the F1 games as well as the TOCA games, I even had all the Micro Machines back in the day. So I know what to expect from a codemasters game, and usually I am so happy I can hardly even turn the game off for a minute - with GRID I even had a dream one night after playing it for hours on end that I was in the game (very sad I know!).
So you can imagine when they finally announced GRID 2 I was so excited I needed to change my pants. I genuinely could not wait to play, as it happens my PS3 died a week before the release date (RLOD!) and I refused to buy a new one with the PS4 just round the corner, so I decided eventually - after much thinking - that my laptop should be good enough to run GRID 2 (which in the end it was!). I would usually prefer to play racing games on consoles as without a wheel or controller, keyboards are next to useless. This game is no exception, numerous times I lost control purely because the keyboard could not notice the quick presses of almost all the arrow keys at once. But, this is not the reason why this review is so harsh, sadly this game that could have offered so much, has in the end, delivered so little, that I can honestly say I think I have wasted the money I payed for it if it was a PS3 game I would take it back.
I can barely think of where to start, the whole experience is so underwhelming and utterly disjointed. The story of GRID was admittedly not great, I got sick of the Le Mans every 5 minutes of gameplay, but overall the event capabilities and the excitement of the races meant it did not matter, you were so engrossed in each race it did not matter that you had a 10-15min boring slog in a Le Mans car every hour.
In GRID 2 there is no excitement, every race is a dull affair, whereas in GRID there was a wide variety of car options from Touring, to Open, to Elite etc, in GRID 2 almost all cars are just standard machines - until the latter stages of course. You trawl through monotonous levels of races with boring cars. The tracks are utterly dreadful, gone are all the exiting 'tracks' such as Donnington, Nurenburg, Spa, Istanbul etc. Instead you have a miss match of dreadful street circuits (at least 80% of all races) with dreadful corners that do little to add any excitement to a race. They are quite similar to the US tracks in GRID, but in GRID 2 almost all tracks are a mess of silly street circuits that feel like they shouldn't really be a race track.
It seems the aim of the game is to see who can smash who up as much as possible but still win, all I seem to do is just batter my way through the field and then cruise to the finish. To end a car without a scratch is like winning the lottery, it is near on impossible. The handling is supposedly more realistic (True Feel I think it was comically called), which in some ways I agree with as GRID was obviously a simulator and in no way like how a real car would drive, but it didn't matter, what mattered was that it was as fun as hell. In GRID 2 I was almost always petrified to hit the accelerator, cars behavior was sporadic and bizarre, so many times I felt I was in control and out of no where the car would career into the walls. Flashbacks are almost expected to be used as a way to complete a race, to me the flashback should purely be used as simply a way to correct a minor error when you are fighting for a long sought after win. In GRID 2 it is almost part of the game to smash head on into a silly corner which you could never have anticipated (still not raced a track more than once) and then rewind and remember to brake. How is that simulating real life? You always have 5 flashbacks (in career mode - didn't see if you could reduce these) and usually use at least half per race. It was always rewarding in GRID to get to the end of an amazing race which you have nailed and not used a single flashback and won lots of extra bonus money for your trouble. On this note, there is no such thing as money, somehow you magically win cars, I wish this was real life and some random guy would give me cars. But sadly, this will never happen. All you seem to race for is 'Fans' I understand that for the story you are trying to better the profile of the 'WSR' etc so more fans means more sponsorship and better races etc. But... it is boring, the fans do nothing for me, they are not currency and I just don't really care if I have 1 fan or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. I would much rather race and re race until I have enough money to buy that Zonda so I can finally kick X's ass in the race!!!
All in all, I just found GRID 2 to be boring and a complete backward step. I know people will cry and moan that it is impossible to recreate a classic, but why go backwards? You know, why not make GRID 2 almost the same as GRID but then just tweak it with improvements and new tracks etc? Why try and re-invent the wheel, because in this case they have tried to create a square wheel and we realize it just doesn't work.
I generally expected something special here and it is hard to believe just how disappointing I am with this dreadful game. Codemasters, if you are ever going to think of tarnishing the GRID name and make a GRID 3, please please please look back at what you got right with GRID and simply try and copy it. I'll pretend I never played this utter tripe of a game and will still look forward to F1 2013. Why fix something that isn't broken? The PS4/XB1 are soon to be out, it is your chance to really hit the market with the best next gen racer there is, do not give us another game like GRID 2 which offered so much and in the end was a shocking disappointment.
If you want, you can read my review of the original GRID written many years ago and you will see that I am not just a crazy fan boy, I am truely hurt by this game, I almost ran home from the shop to play it and now without even being half way through am close to just uninstalling it... all well, back to Football Manager for now!!!