Board 8 > Platinum #42: Grid 2

(+) Yeah! (+)

This is the first real racing game I've played in 15+ years (I do not count Trackmania). I have never really liked racing games but I wanted to try one out to see if anything had changed. Still not really my genre. But the game was free on PS+ a few years ago so it was risk-free to try it out.

I am bad at racing games. After this plat, I think I am slightly less bad. The single player campaign was interesting and very challenging for me, and it forced me to improve. As someone who doesn't really know how to play these games, it does not really give you much of a tutorial, but I figured things out.

The platinum required me to play around 50 online races. That sucked. The online for this game is pretty dead (game is 5 years old) and mostly dominated by players who have tens of thousands of races. There also are a lot of glitches that made the experience more tedious than it should have been. But my number one complaint about the online is the players. They love to ram and cause pile-ups and it makes the racing suck. I recently played Trackmania Turbo and I think that is as far into the racing/driving genre as I care to go. The time trials are fun but I do not enjoy racing against other cars.

As to why I got the platinum if I do not like racing games, well it was an easy one except for the online grinding. Once I got close, I just stuck it out.
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Racing is my favorite VG genre. GRID 2 is probably my least favorite of the dozen or so Codemasters racing games that I have played though. Sense of progression and presentation are poor relative to their other offersing (DiRT 2 and GRID are amazing in that regard). I think that I took a four year break before finally mustering enough energy to finish it. The racing itself and driving mechanics are good, but there is too little variety and some of the events can veer a little too far into sadism (mostly the night ones that have you going downhill or have barriers/cliffs that are hard to see).
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Oh one of the things that frustrated me a lot was the Faceoff game mode because of the blatant rubber band AI. I would just change the difficulty to Easiest for those because there was just no way to get a lead otherwise.

Weird that only one game mode had that problem.
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Woo congratz on platz
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