The best racing game you can get for a next gen console
- Career mode offers a pyramidal structure to work your way through the races. Until you reach the paex of the pyramid, there's always a set of events, rather than one or two 'must win' races, that are offered to you. So if you do bad in one set of events (say, Rally), you have other events (Championship Off-Road Racing, Hill Climb) in the same tier you can recoup points and placements in. This means you're never grinding thru rep after rep after rep of the same race, in order to get the first-place finish that unlocks the remaining 70% of the game.
-You can restart any race in any event without penalty.
-You can stop and save progress after any completed event. A great feature for when you have only enough free time for 15 – 30 mins of play.
-You can adjust the difficulty level (there are 5 levels) of any event. So if at "Pro" level you're getting spanked by the AI and unable to finish in the top 3, you can reduce the difficulty and get that podium finish. Be warned, the top two difficulty levels can be very challenging.
-Great graphics (altho some races seem underlit). Courses are provided with enough resolution and crispness that even with the dirt flying, you can still see where you need to go, with adequate draw-distance always in your favor.
-Overall, great vehicle handling and physics – although some cars still handle like hovercraft, the bane of Colin McRae on Xbox, being able to adjust difficulty means you can live with this aspect of the gameplay.
-Turn calls for rally races continue to be spot-on for the most part. Rarely will you go flying off the road to your doom because the co-driver blows a call.
-Good quality soundtrack and sound effects. Travis Pastrana's "way to go dude !" –style voiceovers set the mood perfectly.
-Sheer 'fun factor'. The frustrations that are inevitable in Forza 2, Need for Speed, Burnout, are all absent here.
The game does have some weaknesses.
-The career mode 'per cent completed' tally can be deceiving, since you finish all races after you complete about 45 % of the career mode. There's still a good 20 hr to the career mode, depending on how many restarts you indulge in.
-There continues to be a rather arbitrary quality to what constitutes a 'difficult' level between one set of events and another, in terms of placement. I found Hill Climb on any given difficulty easier to garner a podium finish, than the crossover segments of the rallies, where a podium finish was rare.
-The load screens for each event can be a bit long
My summary: with the price now down to $40 or less, if you like racing games, you need to have this.
I can only hope that Codemasters makes their upcoming GRID (evidently the next iteration in the Pro Race Driver / TOCA series) as user-friendly. If they do, I'll buy GRID.