GRIP: Combat Racing

The best racing game on the market right now. A great successor to the Rollcage.

In the pursuit of playing something with the vibe of the old-school arcade racers, I stumbled upon GRIP. With only a couple hours in, I just wanted to lay down the controller and stop. There is some real potential here but the execution shows too many lackluster aspects to feel like it is worth it. 6/10 Pros: - The game gives a really satisfactory feeling of speed that few racing games pull off this well. - Vehicle handling feels good. Vehicles feel heavy with real grunt in the engine and high max speed. This makes it feel like a mashup of F-Zero GX with old arcade racers like Micro Machines or early Hot Wheels. - Gameplay is item-focused like Mario Kart. The weapons track opponents really well and they are really effective, making them fun to use. - Visually the game looks pretty decent overall. Cons: - If you crash, you will often come to a complete standstill. Accelerating back to full speed takes 5-10 seconds. Apart from getting lucky with items, you have no means of catching up quickly. - The camera will flip abruptly when you rotate or flip during a jump, often making it a nightmare to try to understand what is going on, let alone recovering. - Map design is horrendous in parts, for no reason whatsoever. Ramps, shortcuts and other optional paths are prone to flip you in ways that you would never expect. Some tracks provide no indication of where to go. - Being hit by a weapon often leads to crashing out completely with no meaningful catch-up mechanisms. - NPC difficulty starts out disappointing. They are not fast but handle the weapons perfectly making racing results more of a coin flip than skill expression. When in 1st place, hoarding defensive shields provides better results than a more proactive playstyle. - Unlocking vehicles doesn't provide better stats, you can merely choose between more different styles. There is no real progression apart from aesthetics. - Some of the minor visual aspects and flavor text feel excessively cringy, as though a 10-year old kid tried to force his idea of cool into the game at every chance he got.

So far, I'm having a blast playing this! The blistering speeds and track versatility are more than welcome after slews of kid-friendly titles that treat speed like a suggestion. My only gripes so far are: -that the tracks can sometimes surprise you, flipping you somewhere you not only didn't mean to go, or just throwing you off the track entirely. -you can be turned sideways and lose all momentum regardless of how you try to recover. -the rubberbanding only helps your opponents (npc's) and not you. -a severe lack of variety in terms of the number of full tracks. -a lack of usefulness when swapping parts on the vehicles. The aesthetics and lack of gameplay impact are nice for fashion-trash, but would have done better to meaningfully impact gameplay. But, for all its faults, Grip is SO MUCH FUN and I wish I knew more people to play it with!

WHOOOO Rollcage Returns! well.... kind of. Pros: -Definitely feels like a modern successor to the original Rollcage games. If you liked Rollcage, 90% chance you'll like GRIP. Same tempo and feel. Three main differences: They added game-world lore, hovercars are available but don't really do anything different except LOOK different, and there is an option to permanently kill cars while racing. -As stated above: Lore. Finally. Not much, but enough. -Customizable cars. Seems like its all/mostly cosmetic, but I could be wrong. -Several types of races. Puzzle tracks. Combat arenas. -Plays very well on the Steamdeck also. Cons: -Not like other race games. It will not chain you to the track; you will go flying. You will die. The AI racers show very little mercy; there are a lot of weapons and they know how to use all of them. It's more combat than race. If you are not used to Rollcage, this will be a rather intense experience. I actually think this is all a Pro, but most of the Negative reviews I see are because they weren't ready for this. -With the above stated, none of the tracks are badly designed (IMO), but there are a few that are OVER-designed. You might double-back, or race on a track that's above two other parts of an earlier piece of the same track. This in itself isn't necessarily bad, but if you crash/fall and reset yourself, sometimes you'll find yourself on a piece of track that is 30 seconds (or more) behind where you actually crashed. I've had to launch myself off the same ramp 6+ times in the same race because I just couldn't land it and the system resets you on the last piece of track you touched. -To be fair, there are spots on some of the tracks where the track just disappears into an open field and you're left to wander until AI cars pass you and you can follow them out, cause they know exactly where to go. -Some of the combat tracks are also over-designed with weapons you can only get if you launch off a ramp at a specific angle while doing a front-flip barrel-roll while braking. I'm not doing that. All in all, I grew up loving both Rollcage games, so this is a very biased 9/10.

Follows in the footsteps of the classic Rollcage games from the PS1 era. Brutal racing with a lot of content. Smooth gameplay and a great variety of weapons. The menus and some of the level design could be better (sometimes less is more and they could have a brighter tone or better contrast to make it easier to read the tracks), but overall the racing experience and fluid gameplay makes this game stand out from the crowd. I'd hope more from the music too, but that is easily solved by putting your own playlists (like the Best of Wipeout) to the background. I can easily reccomend this to anyone who likes fast paced racing games with weapons.

Extremely fun sci-fi racer :)

Родригез - легенда 😘

The game is pretty fun actually. But so sad the oversteer ruin the experience

Came for the music, stayed for the gameplay. Give it a few races to get used to it and it is awesome from start to finish (pun intended). AI can be a bit unfair at times, blocking you on purpose or picking up pickups fight in front of you. Campaign becomes hard around tier 9 and the final rival is a nice twist. The game looks and sounds amazing. The music is a nice match with the frantic playstyle. I had this game for a while and a video by Noclip_2 (https://youtu.be/bPFPGh5gQJw) triggered me to play it.

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