My driving game of choice: is there a worthy successor?

I’ve been enjoying Collin McRae: DiRT for a while now, but have started looking around for my next driving fix. I’ve totally skipped Burnout Paradise because I don’t like driving games trying to be role-playing games. I don’t want to cruise around a huge city looking for a set of traffic lights which has the event I want. Instead I just want to select the car and the event on a menu and then race. Period. DiRT does this perfectly, as does the entire Gran Turismo series and all previous Burnout games.

Sooo… I have Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Am I enjoying it? Not particularly. Sure, the graphics are impressive but it’s quite tough and doesn’t ‘feel’ fun. It just doesn’t. Heck- it’s even billed as ‘the real driving simulator’. I want a fun racing game, not a simulator. On the PS2 the World Rally Championship series and the Burnout series satisfied my appetite.

So what game will be the worthy successor to my current driving game of choice- DiRT? I feel that it just HAS to be Race Driver: GRID. I’ve played on a demo and it is amazing- I’ll be buying it as soon as it is released. Ok, so why am I hyping this game up? The demo I played borrowed certain menu effects from DiRT (which is no bad thing), and seems to have bags of personality (ala Burnout) that seemed sorely lacking in TOCA. The visual style and handling seems to be the result of putting Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Burnout Paradise and DiRT into a smoothie maker and achieving the perfect blend. What’s surprising is it’s actually the successor to the competent TOCA Touring Car series; a series which I’ve played occasionally on demos, but not actually bothered to buy.

When I get Race Driver: GRID soon, I’m sure I’ll post some more thoughts up here. This game should be on the radar of both PS3 and Xbox 360 owners. Better still, try the demo!

Tags: Burnout Paradise, Collin McRae: DiRT, demo, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, PlayStation 3, PS3, Race Driver: GRID, TOCA, World Rally Championship, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 8:03 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.