Been putting some time into this game lately and am really impressed at how neat this game is. Very attractive interface, visuals, lots of unique event types(demo derby!), and hell I adore that the game actually calls out my real name constantly during races and in the menus; “Good job Brandon, you just took the lead car!, Watch out Brandon your tires are on fire!”. I also like the bonuses associated with sponsors.
With that out of the way, even with all of the assists on and difficulty set to basic…this game can still kick the crap out of me! I am using the 360 wheel, which the game works well with, the force feedback is amazing, the physics are sublime(watching insane wrecks during races is astounding), but I always feel like I am on the verge of losing total control of the car. NFS:Shift had that similar issue(actually this game reminds me heavilly of Shift), but I felt more capable handling the insane rabbid shopping cart in Rabbids Go Home. It’s as if the cars have no grip whatsoever and I am fighting to stay alive constantly.
Maybe that is the point, but even with all of the assists and easiest difficulty, often I can barely scrape by. I do occasionally get first, but it’s usually only when I race obscenely perfectly, after a few rewinds too. Is this game just not pick, up, and play friendly? I hate to try out the controller when I have this wheel to use, but is this the experience so many others have had?
I felt like the entire game played at 120% speeds compared to real life to make it feel more visceral, or something. Video game speeds, if made realistic, can feel slow, probably a combination of camera focal lenses, restricted field of view, lack of force applied to your body on accelerations and turns, and our own skewed perceptions from playing too many retarded arcade racers. So my impression is they made the game too fast to make up for that.
That said, the muscle car and american tracks in general are pretty manageable at higher difficulties, the but the euro tracks are pretty nuts even on easy, especially the F1 cars. That they allow you to nudge and bump without your car blowing apart tells me they had to make some concessions.
I can only compare Grid to games like GTR2, though, since I’ve never driven a car faster than 95 mph in real life.
Btw, it’s for this reason I much prefer Dirt and Dirt2 to Grid… lower top speeds and more interesting track topology made everything more fun to play. Also, no shitty drifting challenges.
I didn’t find GRID too difficult on normal difficulty without the assists. Try taking the assists off? I never felt like I would lose control of the car unless I got bumped.
GRID (at least until the … 1.03 patch was it?) had really horrible wheel control on the PC and even with that patch, Dirt 2 is miles ahead of it. Just really really awful response, very little control over how input was interpreted and very little feedback. Do you have the latest title update on the 360? Have you tried playing with the response options (I seem to remember it at least had linearity) in options?
BDGE: I didn’t have that much trouble with it, but I do play a lot of racing games. At the easiest difficulty, you should be getting a lot of do-overs. Do you use those wisely? Remember damage to your vehicle adds up over the course of the race, so if you damage yourself a little bit early on, then a bit more, then a bit more, that can really have a bad effect down the line with car handling and power. So maybe start using the rewind feature to go back in time more often, if you’re not already using them all, and try for a better race, especially early on?
It was a bit difficult for me, but that was normal, as i am pretty casual with racing games. For every race i needed a few retries until i learnt the track.
I bought this game on a Steam deal some months ago and I also liked the visuals and interface a lot, but the game was so damn hard that I don’t think I was ever able to win a single race and just stopped playing after some time.
I remember me and a friend finished the last race by repeteadly crashing against the other car until it had to retire, then it took us about 1 hour to finish the race with a badly broken car, took us like 2 hours total.
Yeah I ended up playing it on keyboard too, it was just unusable with a wheel until they fixed it. Almost felt like they were taking input left/right of centre as ‘keep turning in this direction’ rather than ‘hold this angle’.
