Before even launching this game, I noticed that apparently I've played it before. 96 minutes of play time, Steam tells me. That's a short time, and I don't remember it at all, so that wasn't a good sign.

Compared to 2019, this game is absolutely bursting with personality and motivation and structure and quality. Compared to anything else, though, it's still a charisma vacuum and it falls apart real fast. I couldn't bring myself to even try to finish this game either, and I really don't want to go in depth about why, so I'm only going to touch on a few things.

First, the structure. This is really the bare minimum for a career mode in a racing game. It's still just a list of events that you can do in largely whatever order you want, they just split them up into five different divisions with their own separate progression. Progress in all five divisions, you gain access to the sixth division. The only goal is to win all the races, and the only reason to do so is for the sake of doing so. You don't have your own team either, you're racing for other teams with no commitment or purpose, and your teammate is always useless. There isn't anything here to make it engaging, making this the sort of racing game that could only be enjoyed if it's the only racing game you have, because if you have just about anything else, it will probably be the game you choose to play over this one. Every event is simultaneously too short and too long; Too short because an entire season can be as little as three races, and too long because each race is at least several minutes long in a game that does not at all deliver the experience necessary to support that length. Making things worse is that each event in a given division is a set of multiple races, and it just drops you in there one after the other with no fanfare or preparation or introduction or transition or anything, not even any music that doesn't disappear into the background as empty noise, so nothing feels rewarding at all, especially in drift events where you have to repeat the same one-lap race no less than five times for a single event.

Which leads to the next problem, the complete lack of personality. The closest thing to an identity this game has is the fact that there are introductory videos for each of the divisions. Everything in this game is presented extremely flatly, coldly, and boringly. It's painfully sterile. Just looking at this game makes me feel bored. It doesn't make me feel dead inside like GRID 2019 or DIRT 5, but considering how far beneath the floor that bar is, that isn't exactly praise. There is no emotion at all in any voice at any point, and the voice clips become repetitive in less than half an hour. Not only does this game not make me feel compelled to continue playing it, the sheer boredom it delivers actively repels me from it. Now I understand why I didn't remember even a second of this game despite having apparently played it before. There is simply nothing to remember. Before I forget it again, though, I should mention that this game is not only lacking in personality, it also suffers from a severe identity crisis. It's trying to be realistic while also being intentionally unrealistic, and it did both things in the worst possible way. The realism is all the boring parts and none of the compelling parts, and the arcade style fantasy stuff is botched where present, and absent where expected.

And the last thing I'll touch on is, of course, the handling. It's heavy, slow, and extremely floaty, a nightmare combination of bad feel and bad control. Cars also all feel underpowered most of the time - definitely not helped by the abysmal sense of speed that also isn't helped with the ridiculously wide tracks - while also being extremely prone to sliding and spinning out, because the handling model here is tuned specifically for either drifting or understeer with little middle ground - including for the open wheelers! - which would at least be fine for the actual drift events if not for the fact that the cars being underpowered makes it hard to control them with the throttle, and the floaty handling makes them unpredictable at best, so it's not even good at the one thing it tries to do. Adding even more stupidity to the pile is the endurance events, where the entire gimmick is that you have to manage your tires by... not sliding. In a game that's designed specifically to make all the cars slide all the time, that punishes you for trying not to do that by slowing you down disproportionately. The driving feel in this game is bad enough with that in mind, but to top it all off, the camera angle is way too low, so you get bad visibility and more difficulty trying to judge distance between yourself and anything else, and for the final nail in the coffin, the sound is flat and boring at the best of times, and baffling at the worst of times, like how opponent cars just behind you sound like a jet afterburner.

Let's make this absolutely clear: I do not expect simulator-style handling from this game, nor did I expect it from GRID 2019 for that matter, nor do I want that. I am fully aware of what these games are, track-based pseudo-realistic arcade racers are rare and I love the concept and want more of them, so my problem with their handling is not that it isn't realistic enough. My problem with their handling is that it is bad. It honestly feels like a rushed mobile game built for tilt controls and people who don't play games. Given that the game not only exists on mobile, but looks and sounds pretty much exactly the same as on every other platform, and is not just the only game in the series available on mobile, but the only game from the whole company on mobile aside from years-later mobile ports of Very Old Games, I'm going to say that's probably exactly what it is.

I could talk more about this game if I had an ounce of interest left in me.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid-autosport)