GRID

I want to like GRID (2019) more than I actually do, and that tension is pretty much the whole review right there. Codemasters came back to this series after a five-year absence and delivered something that sits right in the middle: not quite a sim, not quite a full-blooded arcade racer, and honest-to-goodness fun for the first few hours before the seams start showing. On the track, the moment-to-moment racing is genuinely satisfying. The handling sits in a comfortable simcade zone where you can pitch a GT3 car sideways through a Shanghai chicane and still come out with your race intact. Assists are adjustable, so complete newcomers can lean on traction control and a racing line while wheel owners can strip everything back and find a decent amount of feel through the pedals. The career covers six classes: Touring, Stock, Tuner, GT, a Fernando Alonso-branded variety series, and an Invitational class for legendary machinery. Each class runs through 13 events, with Invitational offering 26, and you unlock Showdown races as a progression milestone toward the GRID World Series. The Nemesis system is the headline feature: bully a rival on track and they will chase you down with real aggression for the rest of that series. It works, and it makes the AI feel less robotic than in most comparable games. You can also direct your hired teammate mid-race, asking them to push forward or defend position, which adds a thin layer of tactical texture. Here is where the good news starts running out. The track roster sits at roughly a dozen circuits, and you cycle through them constantly. Weather and time-of-day variations help, but the layouts themselves get familiar very quickly. Car customisation is purely cosmetic, limited to livery wraps with no mechanical tuning beyond downforce and gear ratios. The Nemesis system, while fun, resets after each series ends rather than carrying persistent grudges across your whole career, which kills some of the dramatic potential. Online multiplayer is effectively a non-starter at this stage of the game's life: lobbies are sparse, stats tracking is minimal, and the pre-race Skirmish mode that was meant to keep players busy while waiting has damage disabled, making it a waiting room with wheels. For the Saturday night co-op crowd, the bad news is that GRID 2019 has no split-screen. Zero. If your idea of a great evening involves four people squeezed onto one couch shouting at each other into a television, you need to look elsewhere. Online multiplayer with friends via private lobby works, but the thin feature set makes it feel like a rushed afterthought. Wheel and gamepad support are both solid, and the game is notably well-optimised, running cleanly at 60 frames on modest PC hardware. Note that it requires DirectX 12, so Windows 10 or later is a hard requirement before you buy. The Mixed Steam rating tells the real story: players who bounced in fresh, without the baggage of loving the 2008 original, tend to have a reasonable time. Veteran GRID fans who remember sponsor objectives, drift events, and a deeper career feel the cuts acutely. If you can catch it at a low price point and your expectations are calibrated around "fun, breezy, pick-up-and-play racing" rather than a deep motorsport career sim, GRID 2019 delivers exactly that for a weekend or two. Just do not expect it to hold you much longer.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on GRID.