Recent reviews by burninrubber0

First thing's first, this version comes with Games for Windows Live and everything that entails. Unless you're looking really hard for games to add to your Steam library (why?) or to increase your Xbox Gamerscore (again, why?), just sail the high seas.

Now, the game. It's a lesser version of Need for Speed Shift, so most people can stop reading here and download that game instead. If you want more details, carry on.

The good first. It's got a lot of Ferrari vehicles with very detailed models for an Xbox 360 title, and I'm pretty sure some of them don't appear in any game but this one. If you're a model ripper, this is a good game for you. As an unexpected bonus, cars also have softbody deformation enabled, and it's surprisingly good. There aren't many bugs and the campaign can be fully completed, despite having some rough spots.

Now the bad. Unfortunately, most of the cars and tracks are locked unless you do the extremely long, tedious campaign. Locking vehicles away is a pretty baffling move for a game that was created for the sole purpose of showcasing them, so just use a save from the internet. (If you're curious, getting 100% takes about 30 hours and definitely isn't worthwhile.) I won't get into the campaign but suffice to say it's not great. The game's wear and tear system makes cars impossible to drive after a while, and frankly the physics just weren't made for things like F1 cars that appear near the end.

Anyway. Don't buy this. Get it for free and use a downloaded savegame if you feel like playing it for a short stint, or if you're a model ripper. Otherwise, play NFS Shift or Shift 2.

Normally my reviews are long, but in keeping with the game itself, this'll be relatively short.

Overpass is a change of pace from normal racing games, literally. Vehicles never go much faster than 100 kmh (62 mph). Most of the game is based around throttle control, angling the car well, and putting the wheels in the right spot so it gets over the terrain. The tracks are diverse and generally high quality both visually and from a gameplay perspective, with a good mix of easy/hard and short/long (up to 8 minutes long) events. Unfortunately, the good news ends here.

The game is half-baked in pretty much every way. There are multiple vehicle classes, but only two. There's no real progression system, with the game instead relying on the player wanting to get all vehicles, upgrades, and cosmetics. The physics are okay, but nowhere near accurate (I don't expect it to be Spintires but come on). The upgrade system is barebones with the changes being very lazily implemented (e.g., suspension just makes you bounce over stuff more). A damage system exists, but there's essentially no visual damage and the performance effects are again very lazy. You can't rotate the camera. There aren't even AI drivers, all the "races" are time trials with fake times at the end. This trend continues throughout every aspect of the game, but the worst part is the ATVs.

The game has two vehicle classes, UTVs and ATVs. UTVs are the easiest to drive, the fastest, and very clearly the ones the game is based around. They're driven like normal vehicles and most events are relatively easy to beat with them. ATVs, on the other hand, introduce a leaning mechanic that makes them far more difficult to drive than UTVs. Leaning is meant to help deal with slopes and obstacles, which could potentially be acceptable, but in addition to that, ATVs can get stuck on almost any hill regardless of throttle or leaning. These things love to spin their wheels and slow down massively on the smallest of bumps and inclines. Basically, they're a nightmare to drive, and the best part is that certain events lock you to ATVs; they're unavoidable.

Outside ATVs, the game does have some issues. For one, at any remotely high speed, vehicles feel like they're on ice. Also, there are times when the player is unduly penalized (yeah, the game has penalties) for some infuriating reason, like going slightly off the side of a seesaw when driving off. The AI times also vary massively from minutes behind the gold time to 45 seconds ahead, which is especially problematic when using an ATV since it's hard to get gold. Stuff like this is small but still detracts from the experience.

Overall, I'd say this is a missed opportunity. There's nothing wrong with making a $30 rock crawling game, but this is way too little content at too low a quality level to justify it. Instead of spending so much time on ATVs, they could've branched out from rock crawling into other niches. Water skipping, racing across some dunes... the possibilities are endless. There was no reason for Overpass to be the game we got. Alas, it is what we got, and I can't recommend it even on sale, which is a shame because I really wanted to like it.

On a side note, multiplayer is dead so good luck with the online achievement. Even if you can get it, don't bother because the final achievement doesn't unlock, at least it didn't for me. The leaderboards and weekly challenges are dead anyway.

Flawed. That's the first thing that crosses my mind whenever I think of V-Rally 4: good, but flawed. This is a game which strives for excellence but only ever achieves adequacy. Some of its flaws are minor, with only a small impact on a specific part of the game, while others are very significant and detrimental to the entire game. Vehicles, events, progression, even menus, they can all be described with the same phrase: close, but no cigar.

This review will cover the offline portion of V-Rally 4. Kylotonn's reboot of the series has many different facets, so I strongly recommend reading the entire review, but be aware the primary focus will be on gameplay. Graphics and other segments of the game will be touched on at the end.

At its core, VR4 is a WRC game. Kylotonn's prior work gives it a solid foundation to build on, and it's safe to say it delivers, at last in its base experience. Vehicles give off a good sense of speed, while the handling is suitably deviant from its WRC roots. Cars tend to be very prone to drifting, RWD or not, and while this occasionally makes the game feel sluggish, it does work out in the game's favour. Unfortunately, while the core vehicle physics are reasonable, other sections of the game make that fact seem dubious, most of which will be covered in the Tracks/Events segment of this review.

The game's 51 vehicles are split into five different categories: Rally, V-Rally Cross, Hillclimb, Buggy, and Extreme-Khana. Each vehicle performs differently, but there is no major difference between categories; instead, the difference is artificially induced by what events they can enter, which will be covered in the Tracks/Events segment.

Track design, without the other issues present, would be one of the most impressive aspects of the game. At 22, the number of locations isn't overwhelming, but each one has had a good amount of effort put in, with clear art direction, well-made assets, and an overall sense that the designers were trying to make the tracks fun to drive. Unfortunately, the experience can fall apart regardless of that, and the reason differs in each of the five categories.

• Rally tracks are done very well, filled with jumps, bumps and obstacles, but longer tracks often feel drawn-out, as if driving the same thing over and over again. Long stages are uncommon, but when they appear they can take in excess of 10 minutes to complete - simply too long for their own good.
  
• V-Rally Cross suffers from the same issue as Rally, but in a far more severe form. While tracks are again very fun and well-made, events are normally 6 laps, which begins to feel quite long. Championships are especially bad as they force a 4-lap, 6-lap, and another 6-lap race around the same course, often meaning it takes 15-20 minutes to move on.
  
• Hillclimb events, in part due to how fast they are, do not suffer from the same length problems as Rally. It's also the only category I haven't noticed any major issues with.
  
• Buggy events suffer from the repetition issue, but not as badly as V-Rally Cross. Unfortunately, the track design in this category isn't nearly as good as in the last three. Oftentimes, it seems geared towards a trial-and-error type of gameplay, where it's practically impossible to drive the tracks without crashing the first time. Here, restarts seem like an expectation rather than an option.
  
• Extreme-Khana doesn't live up to its name. It's gymkhana but worse. Tracks are visually cool, but while driving, they are deeply lacking. Jumps aren't placed very well, donutting sections that aren't clearly marked and are difficult to get around, and most importantly, the tracks sometimes change dynamically - they couldn't even make a real, static course.

It's the last two where events fall apart, and are the real bummer of the game as they're required for full completion. Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is that at no point are you informed of how many races are in an event, only its duration and locations.

The progression system in VR4 is by far its most disappointing part. Events appear at random on the map, with no way to specifically unlock higher-tier events or championships. As there is no way to skip forward in time, most of my late-game career was spent doing events I shouldn't have had to do because there was no other option, and this will likely be the experience most people have with the career.
A few things happen during the career:

• Teams: You have a research crew which makes vehicle upgrades, a mechanic crew that repairs your car, and an agent that finds events. All of these can be upgraded up to level 20 as the career progresses.
  
• Vehicle unlocks: Vehicles are split into tiers. New tiers are unlocked by buying a car in the previous tier. This ends up being quite annoying as much of the time, you can't buy the car you want, even if you have enough money. To make matters worse, cars in higher tiers are not guaranteed to be better and are often worse.
  
• Upgrades: Vehicle upgrades unlock based on the amount of time you've spent driving said vehicle. This gets annoying as, again, you can't buy upgrades even if you can afford them. That said, upgraded vehicles feel very different to normal ones and are great to drive.

And that's it. Overall, it's one of the worst progression systems I've ever seen. It forces the player to drive when they don't need to, wasting their time for no good reason.

The AI in VR4 isn't great. It doesn't drive poorly; rather, it's highly unbalanced. Vehicle ratings don't seem to be taken into consideration, and the AI is free to drive as it pleases. This means that with no vehicle upgrades, you might struggle at 20% difficulty, then not struggle with all upgrades and 100% difficulty.

It looks like a WRC game. That probably doesn't say much if you've never played WRC, but in short, it looks fine. I didn't notice any serious issues. It does cap to 200 FPS with vsync off, for what it's worth, and the game isn't taxing at all.

If anyone is playing the multiplayer, I haven't seen them. As far as servers go, they do seem to be up, but it seems nobody's home. If you have friends with the game, it seems to support 8 players per room, but I can't promise anything with regards to quality or stability.
One thing people are on are the leaderboards. The game has per-track leaderboards which, though basic and riddled with cheaters, do have plenty of times to compare yourself to and compete against.

• Audio/music: Unremarkable audio for a racing game. The soundtrack is one song in the menu, which you should probably disable before it gets annoying.
  
• Tuning: Don't bother.
  
• Co-drivers: These guys aren't useful. They read the corners way too late. I turned them off.
  
• Penalties: The penalty system is obnoxious. Manual respawns can add 10 seconds on the time, which sucks after you've just crashed. Penalty-giving cones in Extreme-Khana are also horribly placed.
  
• Damage: Small taps might cause lots of damage, large crashes might not do anything. Inconsistency isn't great when it affects vehicle performance.
  
• Game crashes: It crashes randomly. Infrequently, but it happens.
  
• DLC: 4 DLC cars and a few miscellaneous DLC items exist, none of which I've bought or tested. There was no advertising for them in-game.
  
• Wallriding: Yep. Time trial freaks beware. If you don't know what this means, you can safely ignore it.

V-Rally 4 is a lesson in how much polish matters. For all its flaws, it has a good base experience and could've been far better with more development time. However, as it stands, its poor progression system, inconsistent events, and slew of minor issues make it impossible to recommend.

If you're looking at buying this, you probably know what Burnout Paradise is, so I'll keep it brief and just go over what Remastered has to offer over the original.

There are real reasons to buy this. Online is a thing, whereas the original's was shut down in 2019. All DLC is included for free, and If you're coming from the old PC game, Remastered has the Cops and Robbers and Big Surf Island DLC (never officially released on PC). If you're coming from last gen console, this version provides a substantial increase in resolution, among other things, without being hard on system requirements. However, there's one big caveat: it's not a remaster.

This is, at best, a texture mod on the original PC game, and it looks it. Some textures are messily upscaled from the original, while others that have been redone stick out like a sore thumb instead of blending into the world. Ambient occlusion is the same terrible SSAO from the original, just darker, while general shadow and model quality go unchanged. There's a ton that could've been done to improve visuals without remaking the whole game - RenderWare is quite malleable - but Stellar Entertainment chose not to do any of it. The only notable upgrade will be versus last gen console, which was already a downgrade from the original PC game in terms of resolution, textures, shadows, and AO (it had none), among other things.

Despite the (non)upgrade from the original, there are a lot of negatives. It introduces Denuvo, requires Origin, and raises the GPU requirement to DX11, but those aren't huge issues compared to the big one. This game has bugs. LOTS of bugs. Some of them crash the game on launch. Some crash it in the intro. Some crash it during races and other events. Then there are the smaller bugs, such as ruined vehicles, incorrect GUI messages, getting kicked from your own lobby at random, game crashing when accepting invites... it's a long list. Luckily, Bo98 created his Core Bugfixes mod to remedy most issues, and it works well for that purpose, but it shouldn't have been a problem in the first place. Oh, and of course, this being PC, there are also tons of cheaters online.

Overall, Remastered is a disappointment in terms of visuals versus the original, and its allure comes only from the inclusion of DLC and online. Which brings us to the all-important question: should you buy it?
If you want to play Burnout Paradise again, sure. The game has online. It comes with all the DLC, some of which could be new to PC-only players. Bo98's Core Bugfixes alleviate most bugs, and there's nothing particularly wrong with the game beyond that. However, If you want to play a version of Paradise with overhauled graphics or other enhancements, this is not for you. It comes with a smattering of new textures and hasn't got much more to speak of. If you want graphics, your money will be better spent elsewhere.

Edit 6-5: If anyone's wondering about audio, it's all the same as the original game. Edited the Visuals section to be more specific about AO and added a bit comparing it to the original console release.

The original GRID was a brilliant game. It had varied gameplay, a good selection of cars, a nice array of both real and in-house tracks, a vibrant soundtrack - you name it.

GRID 2019 isn't like that.

This review will only cover single-player and will focus on gameplay, because gameplay is where Codemasters went wrong. GRID 2019 could've been a brilliant reboot of a brilliant game. It wasn't.

The game starts off with 3 forced races introducing you to some of the different disciplines: GT, Stock, and Touring. Assists are fully enabled by default, but they, along with all other settings, can be changed right off the bat, something much appreciated. When the races are over, you'll be greeted by the event selection menu, and this is where the first issues arise.

Aside from the GRID World Series, the entirety of the event catalog is visible right from the get-go, so there's nothing to spoil. This isn't bad in and of itself, but it's something to note as the original game had events hidden until you unlocked their tier. The real problem is in just how much repetition there is, and just how clear it is. It takes 10 championships in each discipline to unlock the showdown for said discipline, meaning a minimum of 40 championships for the main disciplines, and the Fernando Alonso and Invitational disciplines mean even more are required to complete the career. This would all be fine if the events were diverse enough, but they're not.

The game has just 12 locations. Each is split up into multiple courses, but it's not enough to give the career any real depth. With iconic locations such as Spa and Le Mans missing, it simply doesn't feel complete. Codemasters have said they'll release more in free updates, but since the career likely won't be changed with updates, this point stands.

GRID Autosport was the last entry in the GRID series, and the new GRID takes a lot from it. What I remember most about it, though, was just how boring and monotonous it became. At time of writing, I have 67 hours in it, all in the career. It became the same thing over and over again, with only different vehicles and longer championships pushed as "progression."

GRID 2019, like Autosport, uses new vehicles as an incentive to progress. Where it differs is simply in that it has less. Less vehicles, less tracks, but crucially, less championships, less races in a championship, and shorter races. In 34 hours, I was able to do every event and purchase every non-invitational vehicle in the game. At the same time, however, it still began to feel repetitive, and that's because the big problem still exists: not enough game modes. Drift, Touge, Le Mans, and Derby were all included in the original game, but not in this.

Unfortunately, one thing it does right, provide new vehicles, is offset by how few you can use. A fair amount of cars are portioned off to be used in invitational events only, and the game limits you to a certain class for each championship, meaning you'll have a choice of between 1 and 7 cars (usually nearer the former).

If you've played Autosport, you already have a rough idea of how cars handle in the newest entry in the franchise - most of the time, anyway. We'll touch on that later. If you've played the original, it's a little like that, but it'll take some getting used to.
For those who haven't played a GRID game before, or have only played GRID 2, it's tough to explain. The handling is almost sim-like, but breaks into drifts fairly easily, though said drifts aren't so easy to control. I've only played on controller, but it certainly feels like it's built for wheel play, again like a sim, and I'm sure anyone using a wheel will have an alright experience at least. Where the experience falls apart, though, is in its inconsistency.

Cars spin out. A lot. Sometimes it makes sense - pushing the limits on rumble strips all the time, it's bound to happen at some point - but other times other times it feels like there's an oil slick on the track. To make matters worse, certain cars, such as the Ford GT40, are even more liable to spin out, with this example being an uncontrollable, slobbering mess. A shame, as it was one of my personal favorites in Autosport.

The AI in this game is one of the most commendable things about it. For the most part, Codies really hit the nail on the head with this one, with much improved attacking/defending, rivalries between the AI, and the occasional wreck. There is some inconsistency - on certain Okutama courses, for example, the AI is massively quick, sometimes even unbeatable, an issue ported over from Autosport - but overall it's fairly well-balanced.

The Nemesis mechanic was heavily marketed, so I guess I better cover it. Yeah, it's there. When you're around them, they'll definitely act more aggressive, and they'll be a bit quicker as well, but there are two big issues that prevent it from reaching its full potential. First, how it's triggered is inconsistent, with some AI not becoming your nemesis even if you rear-end them at high speed, while others might if you so much as tap their side as you pass. The second, and perhaps larger, issue is that you generally make a nemesis as you move through the pack, and they just can't move up. What this means is they'll be all angry and aggressive, but way behind you. This can definitely be improved upon in the future, but for now, it's more of a gimmick than anything.

This was asked about frequently but not marketed much, and you can see why. While people are clamoring for deformation like that of the original GRID, Codies are providing something more akin to Autosport's, which is to say, not very good. On top of that, though, deformation is extremely hard to achieve. You can ram the AI at 100 MPH and it won't look much worse for wear. Even when taking terminal damage, it simply doesn't look like the part.

In addition to the deformation being sub-par, the actual damage really isn't shown, by which I mean, there are no external or HUD indicators showing your car is damaged. You can be driving along with a bent steering rack and just not know what's going on, and that simply isn't acceptable.

It's a joke. I don't know what Codies were thinking with this one, but it's obviously not what anyone wanted. You can hire a teammate and that's about it. As far as I know, there are no team liveries, team sponsors, or really teams at all other than a section in the race results menu.

Ha... no. They're slapped all over the marketing but might as well not exist. You have maybe 3 races against Alonso and Ravenwest is only in the GRID World Series section - there are no showdowns like in the first game.

I don't have a keen eye for graphics or a keen ear for sound. To me, it looks and sounds like every other Codemasters game made in the past 10 years, hence why this review is gameplay-centric. I did, however, notice some texture pop-in at the beginning of races, and certain vehicles seem to have either poorly recorded sounds (e.g. Ferrari F430) or reused sounds (e.g. Lancer Evo and Porsche 917/30).

One very important note is this game is DX12 only, meaning it's Windows 10 only and will work only on GPUs supporting hardware level DX11 and up. Make sure you can run it!

Poor.

GRID 2019 is a letdown. I'd really hoped Codemasters had learned from the mistakes they made with Autosport, and to a degree, they did, but it simply isn't enough. A striking lack of diversity in selectable vehicles, locations, and event types contributes to an overall boring and lackluster experience. This, coupled with the inconsistent handling and subpar implementation of teams, Alonso, and Ravenwest, means I cannot recommend this game.

This should've been a free game, and would've done much better if it was. It has no replay value, very little content, and what content it has is boring, low-quality, and full of terrible attempts to be humorous. The nicest way I can word this review is that although there might be some truth to some aspects of the game, it amounts to nothing, and is by far the dullest experience I've ever had in a video game.

If you have bought it, I recommend you get a refund. It isn't worth the $0.54 I paid, and certainly isn't worth the base price of $0.99.