Grid Autosport

Career mode frills and Californian accents are cast aside in Grid Autosport.

Grid Autosport succeeds because it doesn’t overstretch itself. There’s no expanded management element here, nor any new curios like Grid 2’ s dynamically changing track layouts. Instead, Codemasters focuses on improving the series’ already impressive AI, delivering a firm and fun handling model and setting it to task in five key disciplines: touring cars, endurance, open wheel, tuner and street. Compete for teams in these disciplines to fulfill sponsor objectives and earn XP, then unlock more events in faster cars. Simple.

Perhaps the best thing Autosport does is place you more often than not in the middle of the pack. There’s probably some rubber-banding at work, but it’s much subtler than any of Autosport’s contemporaries. We’re used to having slightly better acceleration than the AI in racing games (spoilers: that’s why you always win) but here, you don’t. You have better brakes. That means in order to take a place, you need to line up an opponent, anticipate his braking point, then either brake slightly later or pick a wider line and brake earlier, hoping to carry more speed out of the apex. In either event, they usually repass you. Suddenly, fifth place becomes a towering achievement. Trying to fulfill a sponsor objective that demands you drive a clean race and still bag the podium necessary to win the championship becomes the single hardest and most rewarding thing you’ve recently done in a racing game. It’s excellent.

It’s great to see touring events return to the series. They’re elbows-out affairs that the AI seems to enjoy as much as you. Where most racers give you a procession of Sunday drivers obsessed with each other’s rear bumpers, Autosport provides a ferocious rabble, just one braking zone away from a five-car pile-up. Opponent behavior is impressive across all race types, but it’s most keenly witnessed in this weapons-free discipline.

They, like you, have other considerations during open wheel and endurance events. Lightweight formula vehicles are remarkably allergic to high-speed impacts as it turns out, so AI aggression is muted here for obvious reasons.

Conversely, endurance cars can take more of a battering, but everyone’s trying to keep their tires fresh in these night-time runs and so drive much more conservatively (it’s a lot more fun than it sounds).

Tuner and street event types are a bit less engaging, if only because they revert into what Grid Autosport is largely departing from: that homogenized muscle car bombast we all got bored of five Need for Speeds ago. Plaudits are due for the edge-of-your-seat drift handling, but these events are what made Grid 2 feel like a bit of a sell-out.

Handling isn’t a revelation— Autosport neither attempts nor succeeds in beating artisanal projects like Assetto Corsa or Project Cars at their own game—but it is a further improvement on a hugely gratifying drive. It’s less twitchy than Grid 2, with a forgiving slip angle that lets you wrestle a drifting car back from the edge of disaster and gives you great feedback.

You’re getting the picture by now: Autosport is the best bits of Grid 1 and 2, distilled into a focused and finely tuned racer. The more easily distracted, impulsive racing games fan in you will occasionally lament the familiarity; the growing sense that you’re playing Race Driver Grid: Remastered. But in the heat of the moment in any of this game’s disciplines, these misgivings melt away and all that remains is the exhilaration of scraping past a Ravenwest on the final corner.