Colin McRae Dirt brought one of the best middle-ware graphics engine for racing games called Neon Engine which is now the perfect weapon for Codemasters Studios. This engine will be used in further titles including Flashpoint 2, and is also the graphical support for Race Driver: Grid. So physics and damage systems should be at their best in this title, along with eye-candy graphics and high definition rendered cars. To check out if our guess will receive a concrete confirmation we have grabbed the official demo to see what the fourth installment in the Race Driver franchise has to offer.

The demo includes three types of different races: European Touring Cars Championship, an US Muscle Cars event, and a D1 Drift event. The European event is a classical race with twists and turns on the Spanish Jarama Circuit. You can drive the well known BMW 320si on a three lap race. The US Muscle Cars event features the San Francisco street track with multiple 90 degrees turns and jumps. The only car to drive here is the Ford Mustang which offers plenty of torque; in some cases this can be fatal in narrow sections of the tracks. D1 Drift event takes place in Japan at Yokohama Docks and features the Nissan Silvia, already a legend inside the drifters' underground world.

Grid is the first game to bring the official Japanese Drift Racing Championship (D1) with all its licenses and original cars on our computers or platforms. Unlike Need for Speed series or Gran Turismo series which feature a fictional drift championship, Race Driver: Grid brings the real thing. And not only in image, but also in physics and atmosphere. The car will smoke and spin the tires at every corner making the crowd cheer (check out this video). Yes, you can actually hear the crowd screaming as you exit an insane drift. 

The handling is a mixture between simulation and arcade style, but with an exaggerated physics approach on drift events. You can slide much easier in these types of events and the cars show an exaggerated tendency to oversteer. In the beginning I was impressed how every drift was actually looking but I had some difficulties in getting the right amount of points to win the event. Unlike other games which feature this type of racing, drifting in Grid has another points system. Although every drift is scored, if you want to win the event you have to drift as close as possible to some flags scattered along the track. This way you will get bonus points which will multiply the general score. You need to be quite skillful to beat the score in the Extreme difficulty level. While I was attempting to destroy the score on this level, I had to use a flamboyant driving style which in some cases forced me to hit the walls or other environment objects leaving scars on the car.

Which brings me to the damage system. The most advanced one (from the graphical point of view), being an enhanced version of the one present in Colin McRae Dirt. You will lose body parts, bend the car in the hitting zones, scratch the paint, etc. While in Dirt you had to restart the race for every "totaled" damage, here you can actually rewind time in order to rerun that moment and to evade the collision (watch the tutorial video).

Depending on what difficulty level you choose to play, you will have from 5 to 0 flashbacks in a race. These are actually instant replays which can be rewind and then restarted. Let's not forget the replay option with many spectacular view angles, and an easy to use interface. A plus for the XBOX 360 and PS3 versions of the game which facilitates a dynamic camera control in the replay option thanks to the analog stick.

The other two events are similar to former Race Driver games. You will start from the last place and try to beat the opponents in three laps time. You should take into consideration the reputation points which can increase or decrease depending on what difficulty you choose to play or what driving assists you choose to use. I'm not sure how these points will be important in the final version for the career, but I'm sure money will be present again. So probably the game will use a similar top-tree career to Dirt in which you need to earn money to buy new cars.

The demo also features an online mode from which you can choose to play random races or custom ones. The system is just a copy of Race Driver 3 multiplayer mode, but as long it was a successful one nobody can blame them using it again.