GRIP: Combat Racing

GRIP: Combat Racing is defined by its effusive devotion to Rollcage and its sequel Rollcage Stage II. It is excellent at replicating Rollcage without bothering to address reasons why someone might not be into Rollcage. This level of purity is both amazing and irrational, and it creates an unstable duality that Grip seems unaware of its need to manage. Perhaps it’s unfair to throw this level of criticism at game with the mission statement of “cars can drive on the ceiling,” but it’s hard to shake the notion that Grip exists inside its own comfortable vacuum. Grip is awesome until it isn’t.

Every vehicle in Grip has a slender, brick-like body with tires that rise above both sides of the frame. This design is akin to the Ricochet, a remote control car from the 90’s that was effective at navigating slanted concrete ditches. If the car flipped over, it didn’t matter because it could just keep driving on the opposite side of the car. Technically speaking, it was impossible to flip the car over. This was revolutionary to the ten-year-old mind and it’s easy to see why the folks at Caged Element wanted to re-apply this arrangement to a modern videogame.

Rapidly deciding which way is up remains an arresting feature. Sometimes Grip leads its course down a tunnel where the player can drive 360-degress around its surface. You can also count on a series of ramps and shortcuts that will divert off the main course and stick to a horizontally oriented sidewall. Vehicles in Grip, if they’re going fast enough—and they’re almost always going fast enough—basically magnetize to the most spatially relevant surface, creating a satisfying sensation of contact with the present orientation of the road. Practiced and effective play of Grip is impressive enough to capture the attention of any present bystander. It looks amazing in motion.

Depending on the style of race, power-ups and weapons are a part of the arcade experience. A machine gun, swarm missiles, and Grip’s own take on Mario Kart’s blue shell make up some of the offensive weapons. Speed boosts, area-of-effect pushes, and temporary shields help compose remaining pick-ups. Sometimes I am going so fast I hit myself with my own missile, a facet I was never able to determine as a feature or an oversight. Grip, like Rollcage, allows the player to maintain a pair of pick-ups at all times, essentially allowing an emergency backup whenever needed. Two identical weapons can also be charged and combined.

A telling feature of Grip is the instant reset-car button, affixed to the DualShock 4’s touchpad. In my early time with Grip I was flying, literally, off course and would press it to respawn my vehicle on the course before Grip did it automatically. Other times, when I would plow directly into a wall and come to a complete stop, it was faster to hit the reset-car button than back up and correct my course. More often than anything I would fly slightly off course and get stuck in unfortunate geometry, which appears to be an irresistible sacrifice Grip is comfortable to make. Merely having a reset-car button isn’t a problem, but the frequency at which it’s employed doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence in the final product.

Grip is organized around a surprising number of modes. Single offline races are available, but you’re quickly directed to a tiered campaign mode. Eleven tiers each contain three or four sets of challenges, with each of those containing a few specific races. As tiers increase, so does the level of speed and AI aggression. Grip begins with simple races on basic courses and slowly escalates to intense rivalries and cutthroat AI behavior.

Some races focus on pure speed, only allowing speed boost power-ups. Others are a classic mixture of racing and weapons. Some direct attention toward pure combat, with the player acquiring points by hitting other players with weapons (or having a shield out at the right time) and doing small aerial stunts during the race. All of these methods of operation seem in line with Grip’s core goals of fast and furious racing. Grip doesn’t go as far off the map as Onrush, but it does try to step outside the typical arcade racer paradigm.

Another part of the campaign is a pure demolition mode. Similar to either Twisted Metal or any aged car combat game, the player is deposited into one of five arenas and challenged with racking up the most points, by either weapon contact or straight up murder, within a time limit. In theory this could be fun, more elaborate arenas are basically stunt courses, but it often felt mundane and boring. Achieving missile lock carried nebulous rules, the competition couldn’t find the line between easy and impossible, and the general flow was an unexciting malaise of wishing the clock expired soon. It’s cool that demolition mode is there and that Grip tried something else with its core mechanics, but it’s just not there for a long term commitment.

Carkour, on the other hand, feels like a mode fresh out of a test kitchen. This is where Grip pretends to be Trials and creates nineteen physics-based stunt courses focused around creating efficiency between speed and momentum. I didn’t particularly enjoy the sensation of slowly crawling my way along a virtual tightrope and I do not believe normal human beings have the ability to derive any sort of pleasure from Carkour. At the same time I think it’s cool as shit that something like this is in Grip, even if it is monstrously ineffective.

Every action in Grip is in service to acquiring xp and raising a global car level. Successive levels unlock access to different vehicles (with different stats for acceleration, max speed, grip, brakes, and strength) and myriad visual customization options for those vehicles. Tires, three levels of paint across the spectrum, and snazzy details are all available. Every customization option is purely cosmetic and assures Grip maintains a level of parity across all of its stats-based vehicles. This is nice.

I hit a wall after tier five of the campaign (roughly half way through). AI rubberbanding is a given in an arcade racer, but I lost my ability to effectively compete when one mistake would knock me out of competing and erased any hope of getting salvaging my position. I’m not great at the Grip but, after a dozen hours, I wasn’t terrible either. This eventually built a wall that I didn’t care about trying to overcome, leading me to walk away from Grip questioning the balance between expectations and execution. It wasn’t that I hit a wall, but rather I didn’t care if I ever made it over.

Grip has trouble effectively communicating what it needs from the player. Loading screen tool tips informed me that it’s prudent to keep the throttle engaging while flying through the air. That would have been nice to know in Grip’s tutorial. I still don’t have a proper grasp of what the launch button, afforded to X on a DualShock 4, is supposed to do. I don’t know why the screen border turns red sometimes. Grip’s arcade dressings aren’t there to disguise depth or teach the degree control demanded by greater speeds. It’s a bewildering, and at times an unfriendly game beyond its attractive surface.

I thought I could do better against human beings. I tried to play Grip online but Grip’s ability to play online was disabled before the game was publically available. This seems like an oversight on the part of Grip’s marketing department (review coordinated press events are not uncommon) but Grip wasn’t afforded this opportunity. I hope it’s lovely. On every platform but Switch, Grip actually has four-way split-screen multiplayer. This is a very smart move and speaks further to Grip’s allegiance to replicating Rollcage’s embrace of local multiplayer.

Grip’s art direction isn’t left wanting for a better imagination. Four planets compose Grip’s environments because why not. Races are situated on massive electricity farms and have neat effects like desaturating the screen when the player gets too close to antennas. Industrial wastes, arctic tundras, and remnants of abandoned urban Wipeout courses compose the remainder of Grip’s aesthetic. Is most of its art direction borrowed? You bet, but it was tough to care when Grip looked so good through the PlayStation 4 Pro’s interpretation of 4K and HDR.

Time with Grip follows a predictable slope. It’s amazing that a team dedicated years of their lives to recreating Rollcage in 2018. It’s surprising how good it looks and how effectively it replicates Rollcage’s take on arcade racing. It’s exciting that it contains a massive campaign with a bunch of different race styles. At the end, it’s distressing that Grip can’t maintain an engaging tone across its time with the player. Without addressing twenty year-old problems, it’s difficult to make a modern commitment.