Race Driver: GRID

The Codemasters folk really love their racing, don't they? Following their huge roster of previous titles, Race Driver: GRID fine tunes the driving formula while chucking in some fresh new tricks.

GRID World is the game's equivalent of career mode and begins with your rather foxy-sounding team manager laying down the fundamentals. It's a simple format—choose an event and meet the required objectives to earn cash and respect. For example, rank higher than a rival racing team and you get a tidy little bonus for your trouble. Ker-ching!

Racing games usually split opinions if they are either too simmy or arcadey, so it's relieving to see this slotted somewhere in the middle. It takes some getting used to, but a wide range of racing disciplines—demolition derby, Formula 3, drift attack, and grip racing—keep the gameplay fresh from race to race.

Demolition derby mode, in particular, is heaps of fun and shows off the game's superb damage engine. Bumpers go flying, bonnets crumple and sparks fly, adding a sense of real weight to the whole dynamic. What's best is that this mode comes complete with a mad race commentator who sounds like a moonshine-glugging hick.

Once you earn yourself a few podiums, you begin to receive offers from sponsors. This is a very clever system, allowing you to pick which company logos you want emblazoned on your ride. However, each sponsor has parameters they want met in each race. For example, some will ask you to finish in no less than third place. Objectives get harder as the game progresses, so if you feel you won't rank high in a specific event, you need to make a careful choice about sponsors as they wont pay up if you fail.

Graphically, this visual feast is as crisp and colourful as racing games come. Screen blur has been done to death in driving titles, but for some reason it excels in GRID. The sheer sense of speed really comes over well and injects a jolt of adrenaline into the whole package.

Speaking of speed, if you are bolting along at 200 mph and you botch a corner, it's pretty safe to say you won't walk away in one piece. This is quite often the bane of racing games—spinning out ruins the whole event, and is annoying, causing you to restart from the very beginning. This is where GRID's best and most innovative feature comes into play.

Wreck your car or fall behind and you can select 'Instant Replay' from the menu. This nifty slice of genius rewinds the game a few seconds with virtually no loading time, enabling you to select a safe restart point and take another crack at the section of track which scuppered you. You only get a few of these per race, so it's best to use them wisely. But all in all, a very cool feature.

What else can be said about GRID? It simply ups the ante for the racing games that take themselves too seriously, or try to be embarrassingly street. This is racing the way it should be done.