Grid arrived without much noise and left the same way. Codemasters developed and published it, shipping the racing game in October 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, then bringing it to Google Stadia and later Amazon Luna in November 2019 and October 2020. It is the fourth title in the Grid series. A sequel, Grid Legends, followed on 25 February 2022. Grid was quietly delisted from digital storefronts in November 2023, and its online services were shut down on 19 December 2025. The game remains playable offline.
Trailer, via IGN.
Six Disciplines, One Career Path
Grid builds its whole structure on the idea of racing disciplines, and this is the decision that shapes everything else. There are six categories: Touring, Stock, Tuner, GT, FA Racing and invitational. Career mode asks you to pick an event inside one of them, and each event is a string of races that adds up to a championship. The disciplines are not cosmetic labels. Each one carries markedly different cars and race types, which means the choice of category is really a choice about what kind of racing you want to be doing.
The race types spread across those categories include:
- Standard Races
- Time Attack events
- Time Trials
- point-to-point Sprint races
That spread is the game’s real argument for itself. A Tuner championship and a GT championship do not feel like the same afternoon with different paint.
Alex and Kristen on the Call
Codemasters put commentary inside the race, and the pairing is specific enough to name. Alex, from the United States, handles play-by-play. Kristen, a former two-time World Time Attack Champion and a regular top level touring car driver from Australia, works as the analyst. Two voices, one calling the action and one explaining it, running while you drive.
That is a harder trick than it sounds. A racing game’s audio is usually engine noise and a music bed, and neither tells you anything about the race you are in. Having an analyst who has actually driven at a high level gives the broadcast a reason to exist beyond atmosphere. It is the kind of detail that separates a game that wants to feel like motorsport from one that merely wants to look like it.
The Pitch, and What It Actually Delivers
The summary Codemasters put on the box promised a racing experience like no other, with unrivalled moment-to-moment racing, and a structure where every race is a chance to choose your own path, create your own story and conquer the world of motorsport. That is marketing, and marketing oversells. The honest version is narrower and better: Grid gives you a clean set of disciplines, a career that lets you pick your way through them, and race types varied enough that the picking has consequences.
The moment-to-moment racing is the part that holds up. The disciplines force different cars and different race types into the same game, and the game does not flinch from the differences. Sprint races and Time Trials ask for different things from a driver than a standard Race does. That is not a small achievement. Plenty of racing games offer a menu of event types that all collapse into the same lap.
Where Grid is thinner is in the promise of a story. The career lets you choose a path, but choosing a path is not the same as creating one. There is no narrative here that the racing is in service of. The invitational category and the FA Racing slot sit alongside the four conventional disciplines, and the structure is tidy, but tidy is not the same as memorable.
A Delisting, Not a Verdict
The commercial afterlife of Grid is now part of the story whether the game wants it or not. Delisted in November 2023. Online services shut down on 19 December 2025. The offline game still runs, which is more than some delisted titles can claim, but the multiplayer side is gone and the storefront presence is gone with it.
That sequence is worth weighing carefully, because it is easy to read a delisting as a judgment on quality. It is not. A game gets pulled for licensing, for server costs, for the simple arithmetic of a publisher deciding a title has stopped earning. Grid’s removal says something about how Codemasters and its parent chose to spend money in 2023, not about whether the racing was good in 2019. The two facts sit next to each other and should not be confused.
What the shutdown does change is who can still play it and how. Anyone who bought it keeps the offline portion. Anyone arriving now has no easy way in. For a racing game with a career mode built around picking your discipline and running championships, the offline build carries the career mode, and that part survives. The multiplayer and the storefront do not.
What the 7.8 Buys You
Grid scores 7.8 out of 10, matching the published critical aggregate across 13 outlets. That number is the right shape for what this is. The discipline system is the strongest idea in the game and it is executed with real conviction — six categories, genuinely different cars, race types that do not blur into each other. The commentary pairing of Alex and Kristen gives the broadcast a spine that most racing games never bother to build. The career structure is clean and lets you steer your own way through it.
What keeps Grid short of higher is the gap between its ambition and its follow-through. The promise of creating your own story is not met by anything in the game that functions as a story. You choose events, you run championships, you move on. That is a fine loop, and it is not the same thing as a narrative. The invitational category is a slot, not a revelation.
The delisting and the December 2025 shutdown of online services are the facts about Grid right now, and they are the least useful ones for judging it. A game does not become worse because a publisher stopped selling it. What matters is that the offline build still runs, built on a discipline system that gives the game its shape. The racing was good. That is the whole of it.
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