Reviewer: Sameer Desai
For the longest time, Codemasters has been the most underappreciated racing game developer. They constantly find themselves restricted to European and Australian audiences, and none of their racing games seem to have taken off in America. So lately, Codies have reinvented, or rather repackaged, themselves to appeal to the more image-conscious American audience.
The brilliant Colin McRae Rally series was re-branded and re-built (dumbed down) to suit the more casual gamer with last year's DiRT. This year, they've overhauled the equally brilliant TOCA/V8 Supercars series into Race Driver Grid.
Although Grid is technically a replacement for TOCA, it is in every way a completely new game, only retaining the 'Race Driver' name from past TOCA titles. While TOCA was for the purists, and stressed on realism and simulation, Grid bends the laws a bit. That's not to say its driving-on-walls arcade, far from it; but like DiRT, it maintains a fine balance between realism and unadulterated wheel-banging fun.
Photographs: E-Xpress Interactive
Also see: Gaming: Euro 2008 is enjoyable
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