[section_title title=Your First Season]Your First Season
So at this point I’m not feeling very good at all about Autosport, especially having just had to restart the first race at least 4 times because of the AI crashing me off in the first few corners. Eventually I get through it and win the race, and at this point I am allowed to set up my camera and difficulty options before being given the option of one of 5 disciplines, Touring, Endurance, Open-Wheel, Tuner and Street. I decide to head for Touring first as it was one of my favourites from the original GRID and I have a fair amount of experience with the cars.
Sessions are split up into Practice, Qualifying and Race, Practice is only 10 minutes however so you’ll be lucky to get more than 5 laps in whilst you ‘tune’ your car. I put tune in quotation marks because it doesn’t seem to make any difference to your car whatsoever, and there are just sliders for if you want your car to have high or low downforce and long or short gearing and so on instead of any real tuning. Qualifying is a straight 3 lap run and the races vary on laps for the Touring discipline.
Interestingly though when you get into the menu for a race weekend, the first option is race, so it’s very easy for you to miss practise and qualifying if you’re not looking for it or if you’re in a hurry, and once you’ve started a race you can’t restart your weekend so the only way to redo it is to quit your season and start it all over again.
So anyway I head out and immediately notice the next part of the game I have a major dislike for – the graphics in the cockpit cam. The cockpit is a blur put simply, even with the HD texture pack (all 4GB of it I might add) the cockpits on every car look terrible, there’s no detail, the mirrors are just a blurred image and none of the dashboard instruments work either.
It’s as if Codemasters are starting to get the idea of what the fans want, but they’re almost being lazy with how they’re implementing it, and they are going to need to seriously ramp their game up if they want people to buy their titles over some of the racers coming out in the coming months such as Project Cars. I ended up using the bonnet cam because it looked better and was much nicer than the cockpit cam.
I did also try the other disciplines, Endurance ended with the AI being even more aggressive than in Touring, the Open Wheel cars had almost no downforce apart from the very best ones such as the Indie Car, and the other disciplines felt poor too. But I did find one saving grace for Autosport, and that was messing about in Indie Cars on Spa in the multiplayer with some friends of mine. What I want to know is why Codemasters didn’t put as much effort into the other cars as the Indie Cars, they have a reasonable amount of downforce, they feel fast, the brakes are responsive and really stop you, and you can really race them against your competitors.
If there is one reason this game is worth having it’s to play the multiplayer with your friends, there’s relatively little latency from what I played of it which is a lot better than the state of Assetto Corsa (and other sims too) at the moment, and because you’re racing against real people the AI isn’t an issue (assuming of course you are racing competent players), and it really brings out the strengths of the game and lets you see what Codemasters were trying to do with this title.
They wanted to really focus on and show off how great wheel to wheel racing can be, and in the multiplayer it succeeds at that, and it is a very redeeming factor of the game. As long as you can avoid the cars that handle awfully and find the precious few that are ok then it can be a lot of fun to play, and that’s the issue, they’ve marketed it as a sort of ‘hybrid’Â and it’s just not, it’s an arcade racer pure and simple, and when you treat it as such messing about with your friends and not taking it seriously, it really shines. Unfortunately though because of all the issues it’s just not worth the asking price for me, it’s a poor effort by Codemasters that’s good for a mess about but that’s about it, and it’s disappointing because some of their previous racers have been some of my favourite games.
GRID Autosport is not a sim, it’s not even close to it, and it is also definitely not the true successor to the original GRID that we’ve been waiting for, but it can be fun. Sure a lot of the cars aren’t nice to drive due to the handling model, yes the graphics may be inconsistent at best, and yes the AI are far too aggressive, but jump into a game with a few friends with the right cars and you may just see it in a different light. As someone who’s a sim racer I’ll be sticking to titles like Assetto Corsa and probably not looking at this one again, but if you want a casual racer that can offer you a few hours of fun with your friends then consider picking it up if you see it cheap.
[ratings]
