It’s an odd thing to say being what most people consider to be somewhat of a racing simulation fan, but a good crash now and again is actually quite fun. Whether it be relieving a little stress on hard-as-nails racer GTR2 or having tried to conquer a few yards too much on a kerb at the exit of a corner on Forza 2, the sight of your little vehicle heading for the nearest wall – sometimes upside down! – can bring a toothy grin to even the most hard-nosed sim aficionado.

Race Driver: GRID slots nicely into the picture here, mostly due to it being part racing and equally large part destruction derby. You kind of get the impression that Codemasters realised that the action contained within the twisting tarmac curves of its latest career-based racer was a little on the brutal side when they came up with the Flashback mode.

The general idea of this little tool is to save racers the need for having to constantly restart races that they’ve fallen foul of some sort of misfortune in (or just plain messed up by being a cack-handed buffoon). By swapping to the replay mode you are handed a defined number of Flashbacks to use at any point in its duration, with a simple tap of the X button taking you back to the appropriate section of time and putting you back behind the wheel so you can change history. It sounds slightly gimmicky, sure, but it saves most of us the need to sit through hours of complete restarts and, hey, they can be turned off if they turn your nose up.

Whatever your personal preference for what is certainly GRID’s most novel feature, you are certainly given more than enough opportunity to use it across a whole heck of different types of racing. The main mode to invest time into is GRID World, which sees you starting off doing odd jobs for different racing teams so that you can earn enough cash to restore a knackered old banger that your manager has ever-so-kindly gone and put you in debt for. Ho-hum.

It’s during your early stages of the mode that a couple of points will hit you in the face like a wet fish; the first is that the presentation and visual style is top drawer, whilst the second is that the game’s handling is something that you have to grin and bear.

Let’s begin with the positives, shall we? First off the bat, the game looks utterly stunning. Remember that little sense of awe that you got when you saw Project Gotham Racing 3 running for the first time? GRID takes the whole thing up a notch and then some, with some gorgeous inner-city environments mixed amongst circuits such as Spa, Istanbul and Jarama, all of which look and feel authentic to a fault.

The cars themselves also look detailed and are great digital conversions of the real thing, with a mixture of things ranging from tiny Formula 3 cars right up to hulking great Audi R10 sports prototypes. By far the best thing about them, though, is that when they get into bumps and scrapes they demonstrate the finest damage modelling to date; wings bend and fold before snapping, wheels fly off and bonnets and parts are loosened and then fall off. It’s spectacular to watch, too, and rewinding back through replays is something you’ll find yourself doing often, even if you don’t want to use a Flashback.

Aside from all this mechanical mayhem, GRID continues the career system that Colin McRae: DIRT carried, with initial races used to gather a bit of cash and then once achieved going on to give you a pyramid of events for you to work your way up in order to score cash and reputation bonuses. Starting with some smaller series such as the tiny Formula 1000 single seaters, American muscle touring cars or Japanese GT efforts, the whole thing is split amongst three regions for you to conquer in order to win prize money so that you can buy new cars to take on the best the world has to offer. In amongst all this you can create your own basic team colour scheme that’ll be plastered all over your car (pink, purple and lime green is a classy choice), find sponsors and hunt out AI drivers to be your teammate so you can rack up points bonuses in the teams championships.

Also served up fresh this time around are a couple of events that’ll more-than-likely divide fans right down the middle. I’ll readily hold my hand up and admit that I am most certainly not a fan of drift racing or anything of the sort, but there is a certain on-the-edge charm to sliding your way around some tight and twisty street circuits in order to chain your bonuses and get the highest score possible. Likewise, the Pro Touge and Midnight Touge events act as tense mini tarmac rally one-on-ones, with the player being given a descent and an ascent of a twisty Japanese mountain where he has to battle against an opponent with a strict no-contact rule in place. As with the drift races it isn’t necessarily something that you would have picked as a favourite type of event, but once you dip your toes it works really rather nicely.

This, of course, is no doubt making GRID sound like a nailed-on purchase for any racing fan. With more racing series than you can throw a stick at, awesome visuals and a damage model that is so good that it almost makes your limbs hurt when you shunt, the whole thing does sound like it’s about to run onstage, yoink Project Gotham 4’s crown and run off screaming with laughter. That is until…

… well, let’s put it this way. You know the feeling you get when you manage to steal the last trolley at the local Tesco, only to move a matter of feet and discover that the handling is all over the place? Sadly for GRID, its handling is by far the weakest aspect of the game and is something that a bit of opinion sampling has proven to be the main complaint of many a chap and chapette across the interweb. Frustratingly twitchy and without a proper feel of weight and momentum, the cars don’t feel anywhere near as fun to drive as Blizzard’s aforementioned street racing game and really hurt the sense of fun as a result. With a lot of driving ahead of you, not feeling like you are having too much fun when behind the wheel is a bit of a pain in the arse.

It’s not as if I am crying out for realism, either. To this reviewer’s mind, at least, a decent middle-of-the-road racer that’s trying to be neither simulation nor arcade needs only to give the player something predictable and solid to deal with when they’re driving. Project Gotham games managed this to a tee by having the cars weighty and grippy enough for you to be able to tune in to each vehicle’s particular quirks reasonably quickly and to instinctively know how it would react under various circumstances. By taking this instinctive nature out of the GRID handling, Codemasters have made it teeth grindingly frustrating.

The frustration is somewhat amplified by a couple of things, the first being that the opponent AI proves somewhat too fallible for its own good, leading to all sorts of messy situations in which you feel as if you are having to bulldoze rather than race through the pack. I won’t stand here and say that it’s not exciting or fun at times because it plainly is, but you do get a slightly guilty feeling when you end up in the middle of a six car bundle leading into a tight hairpin and end up bouncing around with bits of car falling off left, right and centre. As a result, it’s not surprising to find that completing a race without any sort of contact whatsoever earns you an actual achievement.

The second issue is that the fictional street tracks are somewhat tricky to learn, which in turn adds to the chances of you getting into all sorts of silly scrapes and bangs until you have your racing line nailed down. It’s mainly due to most of the circuits not having particularly apparent turn-in points and braking zones rather than there being anything particularly wrong with their design, but it’ll take even accomplished racers a fair whack of time to get a proper sense of knowledge of even the shorter circuits on offer. Add in the carnage that inevitably kicks off the moment the lights go green and you’re in for some rather tricky races.

It’s how quickly you can put these issues to the back of your brain and enjoy the vast wealth of options that GRID offers you that’ll ultimately decide how much you like the game overall. For those who need a little break from advancing their racing portfolio there is a Race Weekend option that pretty much offers anything that you’ve unlocked in your career for a one-off race, and sometimes being able to just fire the thing up, select the car and track of your choice and head out into a race straight away free from the associated strings of contracts, rivalries and the like is a real boon.

Should you fancy a little human competition, GRID also caters for 12-player online jousting (although no splitscreen is offered, sadly). Damage modelling is in full force here so it neatly sidesteps the wall-riding issues that plagued GT5: Prologue a few months back, and despite the initial fear that I would end up in the middle of a smouldering pile of several badly damaged vehicles it actually turned out to be somewhat more precise and rewarding than racing the AI. Chalk one up to human racing brains, then!

Taken as a whole, GRID is most certainly a very good effort. Codies haven’t exactly gone light on the depth and options available to even the most casual racer, and as something to get oneself absorbed in the GRID World mode is frighteningly addictive. Likewise, the Flashback mode may seem somewhat throwaway on initial glance, but quite quickly you learn to appreciate what it offers. Had the handling been somewhat less twitchy this would have undoubtedly put it well above anything else bar Forza 2 in the racing game market on consoles, but as it is the chances are that a vast majority of you might end up tearing your hair out when you should be burning rubber instead. One to keep an eye on, then, but with the added note of caution above very much underlined.