Grid 2 wants you to be fast, be first and be famous. Codemasters Southam built the 2013 racer as the sequel to the BAFTA-award winning Race Driver: GRID, and it shipped on PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360 and, later, Mac. It is a racing game, a simulator and an arcade game at once, and it is very good at two of those three.
The pitch is simple. Win races, build a name, move up. Grid 2 spans four decades of motor vehicles and a set of real world locations and cities, Paris among them. Codemasters published it, Feral Interactive handled the Mac release, and the Reloaded Edition arrived on OS X in September 2014.
Trailer, via Codemasters.
TrueFeel and the Cockpit That Isn’t There
The headline mechanic is a handling system Codemasters calls “TrueFeel”. The studio’s stated aim is a sweet spot between realism and accessibility, and that phrase is doing real work here. Grid 2 does not want to be a simulation that punishes you, and it does not want to be an arcade game that floats. TrueFeel is the compromise, and it mostly lands.
What it costs you is the cockpit. Races do not include a first person cockpit view. You get first person and third person perspectives elsewhere, but the seat, the dash and the wheel are gone. For a game selling realism and accessibility in the same breath, that is a strange hole to leave open.
Drift, Liveries and the Car You Didn’t Earn
Drift, the mode Codemasters showed off in a gameplay preview, is the best argument for the handling model. It rewards the exact thing TrueFeel was built to deliver: a car that slides when you ask it to and recovers when you ask it to.
The car economy is less generous. Drivers are given certain cars before some race modes, and unlock others through vehicle challenges. That structure keeps a single-player career moving, but it also means the garage is a gate, not a playground.
Liveries you can change. Car liveries are customised using preset graphic designs adapted with colours or varying shades. Presets, not paint. It is a small thing, and it is the kind of small thing that separates a racing game you finish from one you keep.
What Grid 2 Gets Right
| Element | What Grid 2 does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Handling | TrueFeel, tuned between realism and accessibility | Less bite than a pure simulator |
| View | First person and third person | No cockpit view in races |
| Cars | Four decades of vehicles | Some locked behind challenges |
| Liveries | Preset designs, recoloured | No free-form creation |
Read that table and the shape of the game is clear. Grid 2 trades depth for reach at every turn, and it does so deliberately. The modes are single player and multiplayer, the perspectives are first person and third person, and the theme is non-fiction: real cities, real cars, real decades.
The Order You Should Play It
- Drift — the mode that proves the handling model.
- Career races in the cars you are handed.
- Vehicle challenges to unlock the rest of the garage.
- Livery work, once you have something worth painting.
That order matters because Grid 2 is at its best when you are sliding, and at its weakest when you are shopping. Start where the game is strongest.
A 2013 Racer With a 2026 Expiry Date
Grid 2 is the second game in the Grid series, and Grid Autosport followed in 2014. The online servers were shut down on 16 March 2026. Multiplayer is listed as a mode, and that mode is now gone. Anyone arriving fresh gets the career, the challenges and the drift, and nothing else.
That shutdown is the part worth weighing. Grid 2 was built to be raced against other people, and the version you can play today is a single-player game wearing a multiplayer game’s clothes. The handling still holds up. The structure still holds up. The part that made it a living thing does not.
The Verdict on Grid 2
Grid 2 earns its reputation. TrueFeel is a genuine piece of design, Drift is the proof of it, and the four decades of cars give the career enough to chew through. The missing cockpit view is a real omission, and the preset liveries are a shrug. Neither sinks it.
The published critical score is 8.1/10 across 12 outlets, and that number is about right. Grid 2 is a confident arcade racer with a simulator’s vocabulary, and it never quite commits to either word. That is a compromise, but it is a well-built one, and it is the compromise Codemasters said it was aiming for.
What matters most now is the server shutdown. A racing game that cannot be raced against anyone is a museum piece with good brakes. Play Grid 2 for the drifting and the career. Do not play it expecting the game it was in 2013.
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