GRID Autosport

My first honest impression of GRID Autosport was relief. After GRID 2 fumbled its way into the motorsport conversation with dumbed-down handling and a social-media-obsessed career mode, Codemasters came back with something leaner, meaner, and genuinely fun to drive. This is a simcade racer - not trying to out-simulate Assetto Corsa, not trying to out-spectacle Forza Horizon - just trying to give you a proper race, and more often than not it succeeds. The hook is the five-discipline structure. Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner, and Street each play differently. Touring is contact-heavy BTCC-style chaos with Chevrolet Cruzes and Holden Commodores getting door-to-door at Bathurst and Sepang. Endurance swaps that aggression for GT-class stamina with cars like the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3. Open Wheel climbs a single-seater ladder up to the Dallara DW12 Formula A machinery. Street drops Hypercars - think Bugatti Veyron and Koenigsegg Agera R - onto city layouts in San Francisco, Paris, and Dubai. Tuner rounds it out with American muscle and drift stages. You progress through seasons, sign contracts with teams including the series-staple Ravenwest squad, and earn XP toward the flagship GRID Grand Slam. Assists are fully scalable and the Flashback rewind feature is still here, so casual players can ease in before stripping the safety net off for better XP gains at higher difficulties. For wheel and pedal owners, the handling model is a real step up from GRID 2. Codemasters scrapped the old "TrueFeel" approach and rebuilt grip falloff and wheelspin behavior from scratch, tested with actual racing drivers. Gamepad users are equally well served - the slip angle is forgiving enough that you can wrestle a car back mid-slide without feeling like the physics engine is fighting you. Two cockpit views returned after their GRID 2 exile, which matters a lot when you are setting qualifying laps in Open Wheel. Fair warning: the cockpit interior detailing is blurry and clearly rushed, so if that is your primary view it will grate. Two-player local split-screen is in there, which makes it viable as a couch game, though it is a single custom race mode rather than a full career - adequate for a casual Saturday night session rather than a dedicated local multiplayer game. The weak points are real and worth flagging. Pit stops are completely absent, which is a baffling omission in a game with a full Endurance discipline - suffering a puncture with no repair option stings. The AI is discipline-dependent but often aggressive to the point of frustration; getting punted out of a clean race by an opponent who simply refuses to yield on a corner you legitimately owned is a recurring annoyance. Career progression is slow, especially on lower difficulties, and some review events reuse the same circuit and lap count back-to-back, which feels like padding. The career also lacks any narrative connective tissue, so if you need a story reason to keep racing, you will not find one here. Online multiplayer runs through RaceNet, with XP and cash earned to buy and upgrade vehicles, and all five disciplines available. A decade-plus after launch, server population is what you would expect for a 2014 game, so do not buy this primarily for online matchmaking. The offline depth - Time Trials, Custom Cup, Quick Race, Extra Championships, and a substantial career - is where the value genuinely lives.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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