Board Thread:Off-Topic/@comment-33524487-20191201114818

Just in case some of you were waiting, grid autosport for android was released on Monday. I bought it immediately and have been playing it all week.

It's the best racing game on the market for me. Pay once and you get everything, including all previously released download content. And it's a ton of content. There are no adverts, there are no in app purchases and no timers.

It's a masterpiece of a game in its own right but the job Feral Interactive have done porting it to Android deserves all the plaudits it's been getting in the press. Whilst comparisons with RR3 are to be expected, short of it being a mobile racer with lots of licenced cars and tracks, there really isn't much in common and that mainly comes down to how it plays and how the player plays.

The game is all about managing your car's relationship with the road. With all assistances turned on, it's not too dissimilar to RR3; flat out on straights, break into corners, accelerate flat out at the apex, expect considerable loss of peak performance as things like traction and stability control keep things well below dangerous limits. But it's when you start to turn these assistances off that the brilliance of Grid Autosport's driving physics really come to the fore. This concept is similar to RR3's assists but the impact on the driving experience is quite different. In short, RR3 assists you by, at its most extreme settings, driving the car for you (automatically steering, accelerating and braking to varying degrees). Grid assists you in much the same way as a real car would.

The three fundamental assists related to the car's relationship with the tarmac are traction control, stability control and ABS (anti brake-lock system). They all work similarly to real modern systems.

ABS does exactly what it does in real life, turning this off means hard braking locks your wheels allowing only straight line braking. I actually opt to keep this turned on because you can't apply a variable value of braking on screen controls (it's either on full brake or none) and I like to be able to brake into corners.

Traction control also works as it does in real life. As soon as you accelerate too much and your car loses traction, it kicks in and limits your throttle. This is when I say it feels similar to RR3. I opt to turn this feature off. On a lot of corners I found this made it easy (you can hold the gas peddle down through the whole corner after braking, like RR3) but my car was heavily restricted whilst the smart AI drove past me with ease. It means that I must navigate corners with care and hitting the gas too early on some cars will send them into a spin. But the game rewards you for getting this right and the feeling when you do master it and fling past the AI effortlessly, the tail end of your car just stopping short of whipping out to the very limit as you hit the apex perfectly is like no other feeling.

If the above two assists could be somewhat likened to RR3s steering and braking assists (they're nothing alike but still), then grid's stability control is where grid and RR3 totally diverge; RR3 allows you to accelerate to the cars theoretical top speed on straights with no consequence except planning when to brake. Again, keeping grid's stability control on allows the experience to remain similar but with one subtle, yet significant difference. As in real life, the faster you go the less stability you have. The assistant will limit your power to maintain stability at higher speeds but this will reduce your overall competitiveness against decent AI (they'll always gain ground on straights). Turning this off removes that limitation of power, so I opted for it. But you can feel your car losing its stability and every twitch of the wheel could send you careening off the track if you don't keep it under control, so overtaking at speed is a real challenge. I like this. It again rewards you for skill and practice but gives you the option to keep it on.

I mentioned the AI above and this really does deserve a mention. The AI is excellent. If an npc is aggressive (they all have their own stats) then it'll be aggressive when you try to pass it. And they make mistakes! It's a rare, rare thing to see AI in RR3 crash or even just swerve, understeer or oversteer or do anything remotely human. In the months I played RR3 you really do see that the AI is an algorithm that perfectly follows the racing line where the performance is strictly regulated by the initial finishing time (essentially, that's how their "multiplayer" time shift works). It's only when you push them off their rails that anything remarkable happens. And I think this is a huge flaw with the game. Grid is a totally different and altogether superior experience, where you frequently see AI opponents crash, swerve, make small errors and, of course, often they do none of these and perform great driving moves to overtake you and each other. It's such a contrast, it really does seem unreal but in reality it's just "good AI". You can still learn it and learn its weaknesses, it just doesn't feel so blatantly calculated as RR3.

The AI difficult is controlled by a simple setting (not bot slowing!). I like this a whole lot. I started with rookie but after a short while that felt too easy so bumped it up to professional and it feels perfect. It's challenging enough learning the cars and how to race them across so many great tracks so I'm happy leaving the AI there for now, knowing that I can bump them up a few more difficulty levels. The main thing about this that I like is that it directly impacts how the AI behaves. It doesn't just artificially give them a faster finish time by computing their perfect lines about corners to match that finish time. They actually get better, make fewer mistakes and drive more aggressively.

Graphics and audio are strikingly good but that's obvious. The details are great, damage models look fabulous. Seeing a bumper hanging off and eventually breaking off to bounce and skid across the tarmac is fantastic. The spectators are three dimensional and properly animated (not 2d sprites that stand still) and everything has a more muted, real feel.

You don't buy cars (except in multiplayer, which I tried in beta but is not yet enabled but that's coming later on), they're all unlocked from day one and you can drive any of them on any track with quick race or custom cup modes. The main mode is career, where you join a racing team with offers of experience for achieving their objectives (like finish above 5th, beat your race rival, etc) and you race with a team mate, just like the way most real racing teams work.

There are five disciplines, Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner, and Street. I've only really tried touring so far but they each have unique cars and driving styles. You can progress your career through all five, in any order, at any time. As you improve so do your team offers for each season.

I have to say that I'm getting a real feeling of being "in the team" where I actively try to not crash into or be aggressive with my team mate.

Finally, controls are good. I'd say tilt feels nicer on RR3 actually but that's because Feral have set the default values really badly. Tilt is way too insensitive to start with (you barely turn) but I stress that this is easily rectified in the settings. You can simply select "Pro tilt" and that fixes the sensitivity but there are three or four settings that you can tweak to get this just right (sensitivity, dead zone and acceleration angle, like how much tilt accelerates the turning of the wheel if you tilt further). Taking 10 minutes to set these right is just as essential as it was for you when you first played RR3. Just a case of do it once and forget it.

Otherwise, controls are great. No different to RR3.

I liked RR3 enough to play it for a few months. It's got fundamentally good game play, spoiled by its "difficulty" model that gives you the choice between paying for gold (endless) or bot slowing (one of the worst game "features" I've ever endured). It's also spoiled by something that I really am tired of when it comes to so many "top" mobile games and that's the idea that being forced to wait (or pay or watch several adverts) is somehow a good way to make a game.

But it was the best of a cynical bunch of racing games but once I'd realised I was racing the same track for hours, refusing to spend any gold and stopping at the finishing line to wait for the awful AI to catch me up just to keep the AI dumb to stop me needing to wait hours or watch non-existent ads so I didn't need to spend £100 on a car so I could plan my gold for unlocking more cars... Enough was enough.

But RR3 showed me that racing games on mobile could be fun if only there was one that you could just buy. Finally, one has arrived. £10 for the full game and all of the download content that was released on the PC version over the years. It's an incredible port (and yes that does mean it won't run on old devices). It's really hard to begin with if you do away with some of the racing aids and takes some getting used to if you're used to RR3's ultra arcade style but once you get the hang of it and start pushing cars to the edge it's such a great feeling.

It feels much more like racing a car. It's not a pure simulation. But it's much closer. I highly recommend this game to pure racing enthusiasts. 