Grid 2 – review

Eccentric Irish-American billionaire Patrick Callahan launches World Series Racing, a franchise that collects together the world's best and brightest racers for a globe-hopping battle royale. Thanks to a performance in a race in Chicago, you're chosen as WSR's poster boy (or girl), which lucrative job offer comes complete with a garage of cars, international exposure, and fresh racing rivals. On this narrative coat hanger hangs a beautifully polished racing sim that genuinely exhilarates.

Grid 2 cleaves a compromise route between realism and an arcade driving experience. Trading paint with other cars is encouraged, and can be an occasional source of tactical advantage, but an unsympathetic damage mechanic can reduce your ride to a leftwards-trending hulk with the power of a pedalo.
Enemy AIs have grown markedly angrier since Grid, and are happy to plough headlong into your flank if you corner inexpertly. The WSR pits you against regular rivals: after having tangled more than once with expert driver, narrative antagonist, and all-round bête noir Harrison Carter, you may find yourself fixated on committing vehicular manslaughter.
Grid 2: trading paint is encouraged
Racing modes include Race, which, your utterly unironic in-house technical assistant informs you, involves finishing the race before your opponents, one-on-ones; Elimination, where the last-placed car each lap gets axed; Checkpoint, which capitalises on nostalgia for the era of arcade games by forcing you to win extra time by hitting checkpoints; a number of bonus modes, including Overtake, where you must overtake a fleet of ambling pickups car-by-car without crashing to gain points; and Endurance, which is really just a misleadingly named variant of Race.
Grid 2 boasts LiveRoutes, which are procedurally generated tracks where your course varies as you drive it. Much more fun, however, is getting to know a course, and comparing performances across consecutive attempts at the same corner. As any regular Top Gear viewer will tell you: you have to watch out for Gambon.
So LiveRoutes serves as something of a paltry substitute for Grid 2's dearth of racetracks. Too many of the courses are invented, and many courses are frequently repeated in the single player. Players who find themselves especially frustrated with a particular course will find themselves forced to revisit it again and again, even if the game makes you do it backwards the second time. One map led ineluctably to a series of intimate and violent encounters with the trunk of the same giant redwood across multiple challenges. This grew tiresome.
Grid 2: the action moves to California ...
Grid's major innovation was Flashback, which allows you to transport your car back in time a few seconds so as to perfect your cornering, prevent yourself from careering into a giant redwood, or to readjust your aim so that you successfully sideswipe Harrison Carter into the sea. Collisions of car and wall can be enjoyed for their visual beauty, without the frustration they would otherwise cause. This is retained, and is given an aesthetic upgrade.
It's clear that a lot of love has gone into recreating, and then destroying, each car, and grappling with each vehicle's distinctive personality, both in sickness and in health, is very rewarding. Grid 2, like its predecessor, eschews tuning, so you are required to become familiar with each car's quirks and peccadilloes.
It's also a game whose sound engineers deserve plenty of credit. When hurtling through a canyon, your engine's throaty roar ricochets uniquely off the rock walls. These cars feel powerful, and this is because they sound powerful.
Grid 2: ... and Paris in multiplayer
Multiplayer uses its own progression system, so progress in the single-player campaign doesn't count for squat. The lack of real tracks, and the limited number of total tracks, will both act as drags on multiplayer's popularity, however.
But as Californian sun coruscates off the stresses in the roof of an electric blue Dodge Charger RT, it is hard to not to appreciate the sheer beauty of the game, as played on the PC. Grid 2's engine has been fantastically optimised. Older laptops can also extract their fair share of sparkle and shine from the game's engine. A little bit of dedicated graphics hardware goes a long way.
The cars variously purr and growl. The locales glimmer in regionally appropriate levels of sunlight. Harrison Carter explodes into a vivid, crimson fireball. This is a gorgeous, exciting game.

by Adam Bouyamourn

Fast & Furious: Showdown review

Can the latest attempt to make a Fast & Furious game overcome the low budget efforts of the past or is Showdown a write-off?

Fast & Furious: Showdown (360) – furious? We were livid!

There are two kinds of Activisions in this world. There’s the blockbusting publisher of industry giants like Call Of Duty and Skylanders, and there’s the low budget cheapskate who excretes zero budget tie-ins like Battleship and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. There’s very little middle ground when it comes to the effort Activision puts into its game and although its top-end titles may have their detractors we think everyone can agree that Showdown is one of the worst racing games ever made.
We don’t know why Activision bother with such barrel-scraping rubbish but we assume the mixture of zero marketing (we couldn’t even find a trailer online, the random YouTube video below is the closest we could manage) and the exploitation of small developers, working to no doubt impossible deadlines, must work out as profitable.
The Fast And The Furious is one of those movie series that has been copied so often, and so well, by other games that it’s now both pointless and needlessly limiting to make an official tie-in. There have been a few attempts but they’re now largely restricted to smartphones, with 2006’s The Fast And The Furious on PlayStation 2 and PSP being the last retail effort.
Although it’s not based on Fast & Furious 6 specifically this does feature characters and situations from the movies. Secondary characters like Brian and Letty are in it (or rather their faces are, nobody from the film was desperate enough to do the voiceovers) but oddly Vin Diesel isn’t represented in any fashion. But then he’s quite a keen a gamer in real-life and so presumably knew what he would be getting into.
In fact we like to picture the meeting that might have occurred, where Vin was shown the game and asked to give his approval. With graphics that seem to have time-travelled in from 2003 and cars that handle like wobbly-wheeled shopping carts we’d like to think that a few glaring looks, a gravelly voiced-dismissal – and ideally a couple of Chinese burns to the Activision reps – would have made his opinion of the game very clear.
Alas, we doubt anything of the sort occurred and the game gives every impression of being overseen entirely by accountants and middle men, with not a single creative thought ever aimed in its direction. The graphics and car handling are exactly as bad as we imply though, and are made worse by a weightless physics engine, random collision detection, and a mountain of very obvious bugs and glitches.
Some of our non-favourite moments include flipping ten ton trucks off the freeway like they were matchboxes and a recreation of the bank heist from the end of Fast Five that makes it feel like you’re dragging a small cardboard box behind you, rather than a gigantically heavy safe.
For a game that has the word ‘fast’ in the title the sense of speed is pathetically inadequate, although we suppose that at least the word ‘furious’ is a more accurate description of having to sit through the game.
In an acknowledgement that the movies don’t really having anything to do with street racing anymore a few of the missions also involve you taking control of a gun turret, one with infinite ammo and the all the testosterone-filled carnage of an episode of Downton Abbey.
There is a co-operative option for the story campaign, but even though it barely lasts three hours of gameplay time we refuse to believe there is anyone in possession of a games console and a working TV that couldn’t find a more entertaining way to use the two. Even if it involves scooping out the innards of both and using them to compete in an out-of-season toboggan race.
The Fast And The Furious isn’t highbrow cinema but the more ludicrous the set pieces get with each sequel the more perfect they become for video game adaptation. That Activision has managed to make a game so uniquely un-entertaining, despite being given six film’s worth of inspiration, is the only achievement worthy of note in this deeply cynical and utterly worthless travesty.