izigame.me

This game isn't bad, but it's not great either. Buy it whenever it's €10 or less.
I have enjoyed many arcade racers over the years, including Ridge Racer 2 on the PSP and previous GRID games. This one, however, didn't quite satisfy me. To me, it feels half baked, and more like a v2.0 of GRID 2019 rather than a new game. Aside from that, it's lacking in vision; it doesn't know what it is or what it wants to be.
The biggest issue here is that, just like every other GRID game, it will eventually be pulled from sale due to licenses expiring. Codemasters and EA are the worst offenders when it comes to killing games.

Let's start off with the pros:

+ Good graphics, and it runs very well on my system.
+ Lots of cars and types of cars
+ Many different game modes
+ Great weather effects
+ Sara Vickers

Now, the main issues I have with this game:

- The UI is very clunky. For example, you have to use F3, F4, F5 and F6 to browse through tabs. 'Escape' and 'Enter' are both used to go back. Whose idea was this??
- The game is BOOOORRING! There are multiple aspects to this: lack of reward, and lack of progression. Single player consists of generally three modes: story, career and custom race. The story mode is quite short, especially compared to, say, GRID 2 for example, or Ridge Racer 2, the latter being almost 20 years old now. Career mode is honestly a grind. There are too many races, and there's no sense of progression. It feels like a checkbox exercise, and having to pump over 30 hours into it is excessive.
- Another issue is the difficulty. This game is way too easy. I'm playing this on hard, and I often lead in first place by 10, 15 or sometimes even 30 seconds. I was expecting it to get more and more difficult as I got closer to the Gaunlet series of races, but this never happened. Why is the first race just as easy as the last one?
- Previous GRID games from over 10 years ago had modes (e.g. live routes, overtake, touge, 24h le mans) that are not present in this title.
- Nobody is actually playing this and they're still asking €60 for it. The 24-hour peak according to steamdb is higher for GRID 2. Let that sink in.
- I bought the standard version at first, holding off on the deluxe version because I wanted to see the game first. What a mistake that was. I now want to buy the DLC and my only two options are buying the game all over again in a sale, or buying the deluxe upgrade for €20 because it's never on sale. Classic EA.
- It's an arcade racer but you can't really drift outside of drift events.
- And, lastly, where is the music? There's only the menu song and that's it? Every arcade racer should have a killer soundtrack and this has NOTHING.

Now, some small issues:

- Announcer comments during races pop in and out every few seconds, and apply to all racers rather than the player. This makes them completely useless and seemingly random. The only reason I know what they're saying is because I have subtitles enabled.
- Racecraft. What the hell is it even for?
- There are 'fully upgraded' races that you have to unlock by driving a certain mileage with a specific car. I often had to make a custom race and drive in circles for over 10 minutes just to meet that requirement. This is stupid.
- You cannot save livery presets.
- Currency in this game is too hard to come by, especially considering how much you have to invest in those 'fully upgraded' races.
- The car bobbing up and down while driving because of the strange camera behavior is uncanny at first and takes some getting used to.
- The garage doesn't tell you what subclass a car belongs to.
- Driver level resets to 0 after you reach 100. LOL.
- Custom races are online sessions by default.
- AI drivers' skill seems to increase by 200% when you make them your nemesis by bumping into them.
- The AI drivers are glued to the track and bumping into them does very little, while a small bump from one of them will make your car spin out.
Ridge Racer 2 from 2006 is a vastly superior arcade racing experience.