Income system

The whole career is based on income and reputation points, and the whole system is quite well balanced. So each financial decisions is important for your team. Sometimes the lack of money will force you again to race for other teams, or to sell your own cars. You can buy and sell your vehicles through a simulated e-bay service. By setting selling parameters such as start price, fixed price, or listing duration, you can create an offer for every car you want. In general the game will offer you a slightly higher price compared to the start price which is much better than the normal way of selling it. So pay attention with every transaction.

Besides your teammate and sporadic car sells, the most important additional income for your team is the sponsorship system. Depending on your results, you will receive more and more sponsorship offers which increase your income very fast if you complete there additional tasks (don't end the race under fifth place, don't damage the car, etc). The sponsors have also an aesthetic importance, as every sponsor will be placed as a sticker with original fonts on the bodywork of the your car. The purpose of the career is to win the Global Race License which is the sum of all the points gathered from all three championships (USA, Europe, Japan). Every location is defined by its traditional class races. USA comes with Destruction Derby, Muscle and Pro Muscle competitions, Europe with GT series and Le Mans Series, and Japan with Drift and Touge competitions.

Handling

Unlike in Race Day mode, in Grid World you can change the assists options to get a more difficult handling. Not realistic, but difficult. If you are playing with all the assists turned on, the handling of the car is similar with the one present in NFS series, which doesn't allow too much spins and drifts. Thank God, the wheels are spinning and smoking in every corner, and the suspensions are working on every bumpy section of the road. Otherwise the whole experience would be limited to a fade NFS clone. If you feel that this is not enough (like I did) then turn off every assist option and go on racing. The handling gets much more unrealistic (but still controllable), and instead of using the handbreak in every corner, you have to control the acceleration slightly after you exit it. In Drift events the handling slightly changes. The cars tend to spin their wheels easily even on a straight line so there's always a struggle in getting the car on the right angle. But it's not something frustrating but more of a challenge between controlling the car in extreme conditions and at the same time keeping it always sideways at every corner. For a better score I suggest you to play without traction control. At least this type of handling brings much more fun and many more chances to hit a wall or an opponent. And here comes the best part of this game: the damage system.

Damage system

The damage system has been rewritten especially for this game and surprisingly the result is astonishing. From the visual point of view your car will suffer scratches, bodywork deformations on impact surfaces, fallen body parts, shards, etc.

From the physical point of view the damage is not so spectacular. You can still drive quite well after you have bumped your car for several times. The only fragile parts of the car are the wheels which can influence the handling if you hit them too hard. So avoid to hit the car edgewise. A good addition is the ability to totally crash your car. Full wall smashes or powerful cars hits, will lead you to a definitive crash that ends your race. Or not entirely! An instant replay will be activated immediately after the crash in order to control the scene. Do you remember Prince of Persia? Exactly like the sands of time, here you can turn back time to the point where you were in full control of your car. By using flashback points you can rewrite history in that race by replaying the scene.

Multiplayer mode is just there for all the online maniacs. It brings nothing new, just the LAN or the Online option. Either you create the game session or join an already created one. Even if the single player features a co-driver, there's no way you can play in co-op mode with another friend any of the races in multiplayer. As classic as it can be, the multiplayer is much more consistent than the one present in DIRT.