Yes, it is that badass~!
I picked it up for PC the other week and I am loving almost every minute of it! What amazes me are of course the graphics! Me and all my friends are so amazed. Its rare for me to play any game at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and play extreamly smooth and this game does it! DIRT on PC was the total opposite and was poorly optimized.

I hate the driving physics, RWD cars should spin out a lot easier. I played this game for 5 days then stopped coze it was just like Need for Speed: Pornstreet, except the driving physics wasn't such a pain. There's no feelings in the cars, and you don't know when your tires are about to skid until you actually notice your car is pointing sideways. What I really don't like what they did, similar to a lot of the previous Need for Speed games was add a special "drift" mode, which is pretty much the only place where you can drift. If you try drifting in other modes your car loses too much speed. The handbrake isn't responsive enough and when you've held the handbrake for about 1.5 seconds, then you start to slide, and this is after giving it a real hard jerk and at high speeds. Handbrakes in Richard Burns Rally and Live For Speed are absolutely fabulous, but the handbrake in Grid really disappointed me. There're no clutch pedal either and no 6-speed setting for my Logitech G25. I really wished they had made the cars so you could stall it (hence the missing clutch pedal). One of the tracks in Japan (can't remember which one), you can pretty much put your foot on the floor through the lap and never take it off, blasting right through each corner at full throttle. Basically, the cars handle just too well and it's not easy to spin out. There's only one touge course and it's named after the same mountain found in Initial D (which in that anime is actually named Mt. Akina). The makers of Grid kept the original name of the real mountain as Mt. Haruna, but I see no resemblance to the real mountain, which kind of questions why the chose that mountain in the first place. Not enough cars is another issue and there're no upgrades and tuning but I guess that's what the game developers wanted. Heck I don't even like the tuning in the NFS games either. I pretty much jumped into this game expecting it to be a racing simulator since the graphics looked so good. Oh yeah and the brakes feel too good, I'd say you'd have to put the brake pedal about 80-90% down in order to get the brakes to lock which is just too much. In Richard Burns Rally, the brakes would lock after depressing the brakes at around 15-20% on tarmac and around 30-40% on gravel or snow. In Live For Speed it varies and you can adjust the brake bias and pressure in both games. The damage effects weren't real enough either. In the game when I rammed a traffic car in touge mode at full speed, head-on collision, I could continue driving. I know in Richard Burns Rally, even just a slight bump around 40kmph into a tree would damage the radiator, spew steam and your engine would overheat. Sometimes if you're unlucky your engine completely shuts down. It's a pity because I only used the flashback feature once and that was when my framerate unexpectedly dropped really quickly and picked up again, filling up all the frames that it had skipped, causing my screen to fastforward. the idea of rolling back time because you totalled your car, well, I'm against it. Also, when you damage your car, you don't have to spend money to fix it, it gets fixed for you, somehow, by someone anonymous. At this point I might be knitpicking, but you can also wash your car for free...

Now for the things I liked. THE REPLAYS. Yes the replays are amazing, the camera angles and panning are just awesome. The music as well during the replays. Graphics are good but then what game isn't these days. I particularly liked how the disc brakes would start to glow as you continued driving, starting out with non-glowing disc brakes and eventually heating up to glowing, but you never feel any brake fade which should happen especially in downhill touge with heavy cars like muscle cars.

So yeah, I haven't played that game in a while now, but I don't miss it. Live for Speed and Richard Burns Rally remain the most realistic racing sims out there. Grid disappointed me for the most part but some parts of it was good. So yeah, Grid's just another arcade game, which, if done right, I quite enjoy a lot (ie. Need for Speed Most Wanted). This game wasn't as bad as other games I've played (ie. Need for Speed Carbon, Need for Speed ProStreet, GTR2), but the driving physics didn't live up to my expectations. EA has split their Need for Speed team into two groups now, each taking two-year cycles to release a game and each group alternating each release. I hope they take the time to focus a lot more on the driving physics and actually go out and drive around real cars and see how well they match up to their own game. The only thing I look for in a racing game is the driving physics, which, if I ever encounter any racing games I don't like, it's probably due to the driving physics. All in all, I'm a really hardcore race gamer, and the slightest unrealism will almost certainly turn me off, so a lot of the stuff I hated, a lot of other gamer probably won't mind.

The most hard is a 24 hours lemans....... is to destroy your console

Well the 24 hours races only last, about 10 minutes, since they made it so every minute lasts less than a second. The first time I played it it was really tough because the track was so long and there'd be sudden turns and you just don't know where to brake or when to turn, and it made it even worse when it turned night, but towards the end of the gas I was able to play the lemans game mode on the highest difficulty without much problem, it's just the course to memorize.

Grid is a good game. Drifting is fun for "arcade/sim" style.

Played the game at a friends house and I must say I am convinced of the following:

GRID < Forza Motorsports 2