As part of the promotion for my hardware upgrade I got 3 Codemaster games. Grid, Dirt, and flash point. It was a little retarded that newegg didn’t just package the steam keys with the shipment of parts and instead shipped them via UPS.

Anyway been spending a bit of time on Grid and just wanted to share my experience. Lets get my system configuration out of the way first.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 Ghz
G.Skill DDR3 at CL8-10-10-28 1600Mhz
XFX 8800 GT Alpha Dog OC edition in sli configuration
MSI NF980-G65 mother board
Logitech G27 wheel
Grid downloaded via steam and should be up to date

I’ve had a great experience at time with this game but very upset at other times with this game. Believe its a year and a half old and its had 2 updates but still at times seems like a beta version released to the public.

The user interface is confusing and maybe this is due to the console feel this game seems to have.  For example there is a maze to get online. You go to multiplayer, online, ranked/unranked/or private. If you select ranked/unranked you then have quick match which just dumps you onto a session or customer session which allows you to filter by setting on the server and dumps you on one that matches your filters and if it cant find one it gives you the optin to create one.  Create new session to create a new server. If you select private you can select to join a session or create one which requires you setup a password.  Notice there is for starters no way to search for you friends on a public server, and no list of public servers to select from.  This makes it nearly impossible to find a friend online and game with him on a public server. After you have joined a server you need to make sure you read the bottom of your screen for further instructions like press shift to go ready or ctrl to select a different car.

While we are on the subject of online play there seems to be issues sometimes with unable to connect errors, getting kicked for no reason automatically by server. I know a lot of people are experiencing same kicked issue as I see people get kicked while gaming all the time.  Occasionally you get lagged and your car seems bounces backwards a few feet then continues forward or jumps ahead a few feet.  Chatting happens in a text chat box and players need to press home to view it or be in a race where it is displayed on right hand side of screen. After many online games and attempts to chat only 1 player ever responded leading me to believe most players do not even know the chat box exist or care to check it.

Another example of not so intuitive interface is setting up a joystick. There is yet again a maze to go through to find controls and when you get there you have the option of either default or custom and no indication that you can use custom to setup your joystick. Then you need to go through a sequence of keys to setup your joystick. Again make sure you are reading bottom of screen for instruction.

The only way to skip the intro at the start of the game is pressing enter. Not Esc, space, or any other key. For new players this may not be immediately obvious.

In order to exit the game you need to hit Esc until you at the main menu and select exit. So for example you just finished racing and want to get out of the game you will wait for menu to load then hit esc several time and then select Exit. And sometimes it seems to lock up the system on exit.

Decals and stickers on the car in the garage tend to disappear on your car. They are still there just not displayed sometimes do to some graphics glitch.

As far as game play it seems very well put together with couple of very annoying glitches.  The force feedback at the start of a map sometimes doesn’t work and will not work through out the rest of the map. When it fails it seems to fail several maps in a row. Restarting the game seems to sometimes fix it. I also tried boosting the force level from the default 50% to 60% and that seemed to have made it work on the next level loaded but not sure if that was just coincidence.

Another annoying glitch I’ve seen come up is trees and their shadows start flashing rapidly. I’ve checked their forms and claim to have fixed this issue but I’m still seeing it.

Despite all this I have been pretty addicted to the game. The 95% of the time its working its great. I sure hope Grid 2 will fix all the glitches.