Filed under: Toys/Games
Shut Up And Drive The Car
Codemasters’ Grid 2 was waiting for me at home when I returned to Ann Arbor from Los Angeles, after attending my first ever E3 this year. I was worried.
Of course I’d been thrilled weeks before when I’d gotten confirmation that I’d receive a loaner copy of the game to take out for a spin, and I’d certainly been stoked to play it since I’d first started seeing preview trailers and teasers show up on YouTube. But, having just spent a few days driving the newest and hottest upcoming racing games on a pair of next-generation consoles that I was sampling for the first time, my concern was that my expectations would be off for the Grid 2 experience on my lowly Xbox 360.
The truth is that developers are still squeezing more and more performance out of current gaming platforms, and this Codemasters effort oozes good design and nuanced graphical work, despite being behind the frames-per-second and ultra-detail pace set by upcoming Xbox One and Playstation 4 titles. And, because gameplay is satisfying just as soon as one boots up Grid 2, the demos and delights of E3 were quickly in my rearview.
Grid 2 is clearly standing on the shoulders of some great work from one of the studio’s big releases from last year, F1 2012. Influence from the racing title can be seen in the elegant and easy-to-navigate menu design, loading screens enriched with live-updated player stats (kilometers raced, average finishing position, top speed achieved, etc.), and most prominently with the in-game environments. From breezy and sun-soaked coastal roads to the million-points-of-light nighttime races at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit, G2 has created some of the best lighting design I’ve ever encountered in a racing game. (For a sample, scroll down to the bottom of the article for some game play video from our friends at Joystiq.) Overall detail for the tracks and surrounding worlds is not as dense or pixel-perfect as other top-tier racing games, but Grid 2‘s flowing, rich style is sometimes more attractive (especially when seen at speed during a race) in the same way that an oil painting is often more interesting to look at than a photograph.
Continue reading Grid 2 [w/video]
Grid 2 [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 27 Jun 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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