The flashback system proves its worth here, too, allowing you to experiment with just how far you can push a car before you lose control. Cars handle as realistically as you would expect from this sort of hybrid game, rewarding steady, confident driving and well-timed braking and cornering, but punishing over-aggressive or misjudged behaviour. The core racing engine is solid and responsive. My system is quite beefy (I’ve included my system specs alongside the minimum and recommended requirements at the bottom of this review) but if it ran so flawlessly with its visual settings maxed out I’m optimistic about its performance on lower-spec kits as well. At no point did I experience even a small amount of slowdown, and I never had to endure any loading screens for longer than a few seconds. Best of all this comes with superbly slick performance both during races and elsewhere in the game. Even the backdrops look great, and you’ll probably pay attention to those for just a few seconds at a time, if that. The cars are lovingly modelled and rendered, and the tracks themselves are impressively detailed considering the speed at which they whizz by. I’m not much of a graphics whore myself – gameplay comes first, each and every time – but when a game looks as good as this you have to sit up and pay attention. Racedriver GRID also scores points thanks to its stunning visuals. Further to this, at the end of a race you’re awarded a small cash bonus for each flashback you didn’t use – an additional incentive to take your driving seriously. You can recover from genuine accidents but each lap remains as tense as it should because the flashback feature is not an unlimited resource. Fortunately this issue has been anticipated and accounted for, as each event only allows players a limited number of flashbacks.
#RACE DRIVER GRID REVIEWS TRIAL#
The major potential problem with a feature like this, of course, is that it could allow even a very poor player, through repeated trial and error, to achieve the same results as a more skilled gamer.
Instead you can simply make use of the function keys to jump back 10 seconds or so and retake that corner. No longer does one major accident on the final lap of a meticulously driven race completely ruin your chances of victory.
Perhaps its strongest unique selling point is the innovative ‘flashback’ feature which, to any perfectionist who remembers all-too-well repeated presses of the escape key and selections of ‘restart race’, really is as useful as it sounds. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that – but Racedriver GRID is certainly a unique game. Racedriver GRID is the long-awaited sequel to Codemasters’ well-respected TOCA Touring Car series, and has been billed as a fusion between arcade racers and more realistic driving simulators.