GRID 2

My first hour with GRID 2 was spent crabbing a muscle car sideways through Chicago at about 160mph, and honestly that told me everything I needed to know about what Codemasters was going for here. This is not a sim. It never pretended to be. The TrueFeel handling system sits firmly on the accessible end of the arcade-to-simulation dial, and the back end of every car is perpetually threatening to step out on you. Whether that sounds like fun or a nightmare depends entirely on what you want from a racer. The core handling is the game's biggest strength. Cars are sorted into grip, balanced, and drift types, and each genuinely behaves differently under braking and through corners. Muscle cars bully their way around tracks with raw momentum, Japanese machinery rewards precise, technical inputs, and drift-spec cars will have you hanging the rear out through every bend whether you planned to or not. The Flashback rewind system carries over from the first GRID, giving you a generous handful of time-rewinds per race - which sounds like a crutch but actually encourages you to take bigger risks and push harder into corners. The Eliminator mode deserves a special mention: a slowly thinning pack of cars with a 15-second countdown clock that makes even a 90-second race feel like the final lap of Le Mans. That mode alone is worth the entry fee for pick-up-and-play sessions. The LiveRoutes races are a clever wrinkle - the track layout changes at junctions on the fly, the minimap disappears, and suddenly you are reacting rather than recalling. It is genuinely tense the first several times. The wider career mode, though, is where things start to soften. You are building the World Series Racing circuit for fictional billionaire Patrick Callahan, racking up fans to unlock the next tier of events. The fan-counter loop works fine as a progression hook, but the narrative goes nowhere interesting, and track repetition creeps in faster than it should. The AI swings between inconsequential and oddly aggressive depending on difficulty and car class, and medium difficulty can feel closer to easy for anyone with a few racing games under their belt. For hardware types: a gamepad is the right call here. Keyboard and mouse works in a pinch but the drift events will make you regret it. Racing wheel support exists but users with Logitech G-series wheels have reported persistent input bugs with no confirmed fix, so check the community threads before assuming your rig is plug-and-play. The PC version runs well - 60fps at 1080p high settings on modest hardware is very achievable, and the visuals still hold up in terms of lighting and car detail, particularly the cityscapes in Barcelona, Dubai and Tokyo. One important note for online players: the RaceNet global challenges service shut down in late 2025, so that slice of the multiplayer ecosystem is gone for good. Peer-to-peer online racing is still functional, but the matchmaking pool is thin. Local split-screen is present on PC, which earns the game real credit - hook up two controllers on a couch setup and it holds up as a fun heads-up racer, even if the mode is basic. Bottom line: GRID 2 is the kind of racer that clicks hardest when you stop fighting the physics and let the car do its theatrical thing. It is not the successor fans of the original GRID were hoping for - the dropped cockpit view still stings, and Grid Autosport fixed most of the complaints within a year. But taken on its own terms as an accessible, visually sharp arcade racer with a handful of genuinely thrilling race modes, it earns its Very Positive rating on Steam honestly.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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