Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Barreling down the last few turns of Nuremburg Raceway in Germany, the clock is moving fast, showing about 15 seconds to get to the finish line.  Smoke wisps and rubber flecks off of the tires as the BMW 320i screeches into the last turn.  Franticly, the driver slams the pedal, seeing the finish line ahead.  The sides of the track blur into a streaking mosaic, while listening to the screams of the crowd waiting in anticipation to see if the car passes the finish line in time.  As he crosses the finish line, the clock shows less than a second of time left, leaving him time to put down the controller and dance around the room, basking in the latest victory in Race Driver GRID.

GRID is the latest racing game in the long running, TOCA and Race Driver series from Codemasters, that gives players a chance to race in several classes of racing, around the world.  Codemasters has borrowed a lot of the visuals as well as the game mechanics from DiRT, and refined them to put together one of the strongest racing games on the PC in some time.

While Colin McRae’s DiRT covered the rally aspects of racing, GRID focuses on fast cars on street circuits, similar to what is found in a game like Project Gotham Racing.   Tracks come from all over the world, broken down into three regions: The United States, Europe and Japan.  Each area has a great selection of tracks that come from simple left turn circuits, to the winding curves of a Nuremburg.

Selecting a race is easy enough, with your menu offering a Quick Action selection to get you right into the heat of the action, or you can go with the Career mode, which has you earning money, reputation points and vehicles to get to the top of the racing world.  Each venue in Career will have a monetary goal for finishing the race, but it will also have a bonus goal that will be worth more money and prizes.  Some goals are rather simple, like finishing fifth or better, while some will test your skill, like having to get in front of a specific team.

Once you get in the race, the first thing you notice is how spectacular the game looks.  The cars have a surprising amount of detail shown, and as they pick up damage, they look even better.  Dragging bumpers, littered roads, in cockpit movement, it is all a memorable feast for the eyes.  The road surface looks fantastic as it changes texture depending on the area you are racing in.  Sometimes, you will see patchwork fixes in the road, that can affect your driving.  Even the little details on the side of the track are made with care.  Tire and foam protection in the turns explodes into a fountain of chunks when you run into them.  Spectators adorn the road, cheering you on, and it might have just been me, or the speed of the vehicle, but I think they are dynamic in nature.  Smoke effects are a bit heavy and overdone at times, but overall, if you have the horsepower and video card(s) for this game, you will be rewarded with a showpiece of a racing excellence.

All these visuals are great, but will mean nothing if the racing engine is subpar.  Fortunately, for GRID, the engine takes all the good things about DiRT and refines the bad ones to make for a very competent racer.  The cars seem to shift rather naturally, dependent on weight and other factors.  An American muscle car felt heavy to steer and always seemed to have a lot of giddiup in the back wheels, like it was on the edge of not being in control.  Jump into a Lamborghini Murcielago, and it glides around the track, due to its gripping suspension and low to the ground profile.  All the cars just have that dialed in feeling, keeping you in the immersion of the race.  It also should be noted that the cars in GRID always seem to give good tactile feedback from the road, although, it cannot be confirmed if the game uses four point physics to accomplish.  Whatever they are doing though, it plays great.

Another great feature in the game is the Flashback.  Flashback allows you to recover from a crash or a bad turn, or any other happening on the race course, by allowing you to rewind the replay to a point before the crash and jumping you back in the race.  The alieviates a lot of the restarts that one might have while trying to pass a difficult race.  Especially when you end up crashing or spinning out mere feet before the finish line only to come in ninth place.  And while veteran racers might feel it takes away from the punishment for making a mistake, realize that you can only use the Flashback feature a couple of times before you lose it.  Hopefully more racing games will look at this innovation and use it for their own.

Audio is another strong point in GRID, with the cars all sounding very throaty, giving you the sense of how much power is under the hood in some of these beasts of the road.  Screeching tires in a turn, the shift of the engine between gears, down to the horrible sound of crushing metal as you hit a barrier, it is all here with great fidelity.  Crew dialog is average though, never seeming to care for what you are doing except at the beginning of a race, at each lap turn or when you cross the finish.  Otherwise, he is a bit mechanical, and never seems to be too lively.  Some of that is offset by a very cool feature I have not seen in a racing game to date, but adds a lot to the immersion, and that is a true name for yourself that the crew will address.  When you build a character, you assign it a name from a very comprehensive list of first names, and call signs.  It is really cool to have the game address you by your name when referencing something and it will be interesting if others will pick up on this.  Crowd ambiance plays out nicely as well, telling you if you are doing good or bad, or if others around you are catching up.  It is not spectacular, but it is another way to feel how you are doing on the track.

Multiplayer is supported in the game for up to 16 racers in any of the races covered in GRID.  As with a lot of the Games for Windows titles, GRID uses a multiplayer mode similar to Xbox Live, where you have Quick Match, for jumping into an online game fast, Custom Match, which allows you to search for games using keywords, and finally Starting a Match, which allows you, the player, to set up a multiplayer race with your own parameters.  The game does use a host based system, instead of dedicated race servers, which is a bit of a downer, but so far, I have not witnessed a host getting an advantage due to this, but it could just be that I am running up on drivers that are not as skilled.  Lag was minimal to non-existent at times, with the exception of the occasional car shift, but nothing that killed the racing.  What did hamper my experience was the lack of online players.  For a game that has so much going for it, it is a shame to see so few players out there that own GRID.

There is so much about Race Driver GRID that is good, that is seems like a no brainer to buy, and you would be right.  There are a few rough patches, like the Le Mans cars just seem so powerful and difficult to control when compared to the rest of the vehicles, but that is a minor issue.  The toss in of a demolition derby mode seems out of place, when you compare it to the solid driving engine that is in this game.  While the game ran smooth as silk with all details turned on, that was with a Q6600 Quad Core, 2GB of RAM and an 8800GT with 512MB of RAM, not with the minimum specs, which seem downplayed.  Also the amount of car tweaking and customization is rather limited, with few modifications to the cars available, which could be an issue to players that love to dial in a vehicle.

With all that said, Race Driver GRID is a spectacular racing game that does so much right for the sport of TOCA Racing.  It is always challenging, never overbearing, and a lot of fun to play.  Lots of visual eye candy, mixed with great audio and a solid racing engine, you will be hard pressed to find a better racing game on the market.  Race Driver GRID gets a 5 out of 5 Aeropausonats.