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The visual customisation here is quite narrow, though, so don’t expect to be able to create any real-world replicas. Your cars will be unique, with their own mileage, win/loss rate, XP level, and incident history. As opposed to the single-player, where you race for other teams in their cars, multiplayer in Autosport lets you build your own garage of cars. Unlike Grid 2, however, Autosport’s broader types of racing and greater variety of tracks means there’s far more to keep us occupied. Like Grid 2, multiplayer is virtually a separate game in Autosport. Purpose-built race cars are more deafening. Things are mostly satisfactory in the audio stakes, with some nice ambient effects, but the exhaust notes could’ve had more bark. I’m just going to quit and restart the event. For instance, what’s the point of programming in punctures when I know I can’t change that tyre? If I’m out of Flashbacks (or I’ve deactivated them) am I really going to run the rest of the race on my rim? Nope. It also makes some of what Codemasters does with its damage modelling a waste of energy. Deciding whether pitting for fresh rubber during an enduro to salvage a race objective would’ve added an interesting layer of strategy not being able to do so is nonsense, really. It’s a bizarre omission, and it’s one that quietly undermines a lot of what Autosport does right. You can bring a little logic to the tyre wear issue by manually increasing the length of your endurance races but that only serves to highlight Autosport’s most egregious sin: no pit stops. It’s strange because tyre wear, which is only a factor in the Endurance category, is scaled to the length of the race. They look the part, but the default length of these races is just eight minutes.

The AI makes mistakes, although sometimes they make the sames ones even after multiple race restarts.Įndurance is Autosport’s most confusing category. Drifting feels a bit more forgiving (and more fun) than it did in Grid 2 but the Time Trials here aren’t really that pulse-raising they honestly just feel like a qualifying session for a race that never comes. The Tuner category is probably the weakest of the five. Autosport may be Grid going back to its roots, but it still favours fun over unflinching accuracy. Open Wheel racing is not unlike Codemasters’ own F1 series, although it’s nowhere near as brutally unforgiving as the latter can be. The default length for the races errs on the short side, but there’s an option to multiply race distances by up to five should you find yourself yearning for longer contests. Real-life circuits are the focus here (there are 13, compared to Grid 2’s five, and most feature several routes), and Codemasters has reinserted practice periods and qualifying rounds.

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Autosport lacks the real-world championships of its Race Driver ancestors, but the aggressive doorhandle-to-doorhandle nature of touring car racing is extremely well-emulated. The Touring category is where Autosport most resembles the typical Codemasters circuit racers of old. Autosport’s prestige team, Ravenwest, demands top results but shells out plenty of XP and allows you to adjust a variety of tuning options at your own discretion.

Less bold teams have easily achievable success targets but modest XP rewards, and you’ll usually find you’re not able to tune your car a great deal, if at all. The better you perform in each category the more offers you’ll receive from rival teams. Autosport doesn’t care that I’d unlocked all of its touring car events before I’d even started scratching the surface of its Street events, nor will it care if you do the exact opposite. It was at least two or three sessions before I even competed in my first Street race.

As a touring car fan, I found myself exclusively racing tin-tops for many hours upon first booting up.

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You need to play them all eventually if you want to meet the minimum requirements to unlock the special Grid Grand Slam events (which string together a series of races from across all five types of racing), but outside of that how you progress through the races on offer is determined entirely by you. In Autosport, progression is divided across five categories you can play through as you desire: Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner, and Street. The multi-disciplined approach that has defined the Grid series (and the Race Driver series before it) returns here.

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