Gaming Nexus: GRID Review

Gaming Nexus writes: "After watching another tour de force performance from one of my favorite Hollywood actors, I was presented with a disarming epiphany: GRID is the Nicole Kidman of racing games.

I didn't believe it at first either. But with GRID's fine-lined features, willingness to take on difficult and not always likeable roles, and its overall variety of selective yet class-act performances, this seemingly ethereal analogy began to cement itself. Not to say that Nicole Kidman hasn't run into the odd roadblock or two during her tenure as one of Tinseltown's leading ladies. Which is to admit that developer Codemasters didn't race away without erecting the occasional roadblock for its GRID actors either.

The first roadblock I encountered wasn't those initial gravel-choked elbows in France's Circuit de la Sarthe during my maiden 24 Hours of Le Mans. It wasn't those anime angles drifting around Japan's Yokohama Docks. It was, in fact, the seemingly innocuous test-run time trial. These trials, to the novice driver, are not your friend. And in racing games--a genre seemingly absent end bosses--those acutely-sharpened minutes and seconds are GRID's equivalent of a low-level bad guy. The clock face reading 01:37.00 for one particular event was my minutes/seconds/hundredths Shadow of the Colossus. Every hard-braking corner and subsequent stretch of gray asphalt was my God of War quick time event. And that checkered flag at the end of those short hauls was my Assassin's Creed target marked for death."