Racing, serious business
It doesn’t matter where you finish in your first race, only that you do finish. From there you’ll be teleported to the familiar garage screen of racing game’s past. Out of the blue comes this soft yet slightly intimidating voice of your business manager, who chooses to retain her anonymity. Though her sudden appearence and lack of humanity makes her slightly inaccessible as a character and having her call me Dumptruck every five minutes like she’s my best friend gets old pretty quickly this not exactly a bad thing.. More of a mechanism than a character, she gets you from race to race then quickly shifts out of your way to let you get back to the driving.
The game follows a pretty loose and predictable rag to riches path. You start off a rookie and climb through to the racing ranks till you’re king of the go-karters. However, there is no overt story rather than abstract series of tasks “get this license”, “get your car built”, “earn this much money”, these give you a kind of intangible focus without creating obstacles that resemble anything like a plot. Good.
You earn money for winning races, but you also acquire reputation, the currency of cool. While you earn reputation for doing pretty much anything you’ll get more if you, for example, race at a higher difficulty or complete a race without restarting. Speaking of restarting, GRID has one feature which in my opinion is nothing short of world-beating genius. At any point in the race if you make a horrible mistake, say you total your car two metres from a first place finish, you can return to any point in the in-game replay and restart from that point. Of course “flashbacks” are a finite affair, depending on difficulty and therefore reputation; they are by no means an exploit. But, when used wisely, they are infinitely useful.
