Codemasters' 2019 reboot of GRID is a mostly solid entry in the series. It looks great and plays well enough, but some extremely aggressive DLC practices - half the game is locked away behind a season pass - is pretty darn gross. Maybe that's why the price dropped so far, hmm? Because no one wanted to pay full price for half a game, hmm? Read more and watch gameplay here.
For a company that makes pretty much nothing but racing games these days, it's pretty weird how Codemasters' racers still feel so awkward to actually play. I've complained since the last-gen days of the original DIRT and GRID that Codemasters games always feel like the car just has a pivot point in the middle so it feels like they rotate through a corner (or maybe the corner rotates around the car ...) rather than smoothly turning through the corner like in every other racing game. The fact that it's been 15 years or so like this and they have never addressed it means it's probably never going to change. It also means I'm probably going to always struggle to play them.
Normally I play racing games in the cockpit view because it just feels better to me. Not so in GRID. I always felt like I was losing control of the back end and never felt comfortable. Switching to a third-person chase camera made it far more playable.
One thing that needs to be said - even though the video isn't coming for a couple weeks - is that I played Forza Motorsport 7 for the first time and made a video and it immediately felt 1000000x better than GRID. Forza is smooth and feels good and is far more approachable than GRID even though it is far more of a sim than GRID's more sim-cade style. The difference in feel between the games is absolutely staggering.
For all the crap I can talk about Codemasters, at least they aren't Milestone. Milestone makes more racing games than anyone and they're the most mediocre shitty god awful shit I've ever tried to play. How do they keep getting more work to do something they're so obviously terrible at?
