Well, this snuck up on us a little bit. Grid Motorsport is out right now on the App Store. It's a racing game, it's premium, and it's probably the game that hardcore racers have been waiting to land on iOS for a good long while.
Why is that? Well, because it's got everything you'd want from a mobile racer, and it's all presented in a package that could well make your eyes bleed. But, like, in a good way. I'm sure there are sometimes ways that eye-bleeding is good.
Anyway, I've written some words on the very subject. If you've got past these three paragraphs, I urge you to keep going. Things can only really get better. At least I hope they're going to, otherwise we're all in trouble. Oh, and click the emboldened name of the game below to download it.
So why should gear heads be excited about Grid? Well for starters it's a premium game. Remember how everyone got really upset about Real Racing 3 being free to play? Yeah well there's none of that here. You pay ten bucks, you get the whole thing.
That includes a good chunk of DLC as well. There are no IAPs in Grid, just pedal to the metal, furious fast car racing. But if you're thinking this is an arcade experience, you're very much barking up the wrong tree.
It's tough
Grid is a difficult game to get to grips with. If you're new to the simmier end of racing games then you're going to be slamming into a lot of walls. You're penalised for that in the race, but not with monetisation or anything like that. You're expected to be a bit rubbish to start with, and the game gives you a chance to grow.
But it's by no-means impossible to come out on top. The controls are slick, the game helps you through the learning process, and once the training wheels come off you're going to throwing super cars around corners with gay abandon.
It looks amazing
There's no mistaking that Grid is one of the best looking games on the App Store. It looks incredible, all shiny cars and believable physics. There's plenty of blue skies as well. And everyone knows that racers with blue skies are the best sort of racers.
That does mean you're going to need a high-end iOS device to play it. And you're going to need a lot of space free as well. With all the DLC and the HD texture packs you're going to have to find around 6GB of memory on your phone. That's a lot of photos of other people's cats doing silly things you're going to have to delete.
Check out Pocket Gamer's list of the best driving games on iOS here
There's loads to do
You've got 100 cars to unlock, and 100 tracks to race them on. I'm not a mathematician, but that means there are literally loads of different combinations of car and circuit for you to try out. And if you keep crashing, there's help for you too.
The difficulty is scaleable, so whether you're Mister Bean or Nigel Mansell (look it up), you're going to be able to push your face deep into the rubber and gasoline scented bosom of the experience.
