This time I bought "Grand Prix Story", which should be right up my alley, as I am both a fan of racing games and also enjoy watching races on TV.
Grand Prix Story puts you into the shoes of a racing team owner, letting you build cars, hire mechanics and racers, and generally lets you go about living out your Frank Williams fantasies (sans the tragic spine injuries).
Initially your choices will be limited. You'll only be able to build one type of car, a roadster, and select between two different drive train configurations, front wheel drive or rear wheel drive.
But in good "Story" game fashion, you will soon be presented with more options, getting to research new parts or vehicle types, or upgrading your existing vehicles or parts.
This means that you will soon be tweaking and tuning your cars so they perform optimally for the various races that you participate in.
And the races are of course what the game is all about. Sadly, they're a bit of an uninteresting affair.
The presentation of the races is fine enough, with the traditional art style of Kairosoft being used to good effect.
But you have absolutely no option of actually influencing the races, and spending a minute or two just watching cars plod around the track does become old hat fairly quickly.
I understand that there is a "fast" option for the races, which unlocks after you've played through it once, but frankly you're going to be extremely frustrated way before you get that far.
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| "Faster! Go faster, damn you!" |
And I have more complaints about Grand Prix Story.
There is something seriously off kilter about the economy of the game. I really enjoyed in Game Dev Story that it took a really long time before you had to stop worrying about money.
You were usually just scraping by, even if you had made several big hit games, because the development cost of new games and buying into new consoles was so expensive.
This kept a sense of tension in the game, and made you really worry about how your new "Pirate Racing 3" would do in the market (they loved it, by the way).
But in Grand Prix Story I was quickly amassing huge piles of money, to the point that after a few hours of gameplay I had several millions in the bank and raking in money far far faster than I could spend it.
Part of the problem is the way that the economy of Grand Prix Story focuses so heavily on research points rather than cash.
You're going to need research points to do everything from researching new tech, to upgrading parts and vehicles. And those are the most essential ways that you are going to increase your chances of winning races.
So while you're going to need some cash to pay your staff and build new cars, you're actually going to be far more interested in getting research points rather than money.
This leads to you participating in a lot of races simply for the purpose of getting research points, as the main avenue of research point accumulation is through races (why can't I buy a frigging lab or something?).
This makes the lack of a way to skip watching the races even more aggravating, as you're now forced to watch a race where you don't even care about your placement.
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| Developing and customizing cars is probably one of the most entertaining parts of Grand Prix Story |
When you finally get your research points and upgrade your car, the next issue is that there seems to be a very large gap in the quality of the competition from one race to the next.
This means that your prize car that you have won the last five races with, with a comfortable multiple seconds margin, is suddenly only good enough to land you a 3rd or 4th place.
Which means going back to "grinding" the easier races for more research points, so you can get the upgrades you need to make a competitive racer.
If you're still unclear about my feeling for Grand Prix Story (maybe you fell asleep after the first few lines of the review, or you were thinking about playing Battlefield 3), then let me give it to you short and sweet (that's what she said).
I am rather disappointed in Grand Prix Story. I went into the game hoping to find another addictive phone game experience like Game Dev Story.
And while the game initially struck all the right chords, it's clear that there are some fundamental design issues with Grand Prix Story that makes this a much less compelling and enjoyable experience than it's game-design-em-up sibling.
If you've already played Game Dev Story and think that a shot of Grand Prix Story is just the sort of follow up joyride that you need, then I would recommend that you brake and swerve around it.
If you're new to Kairosoft games and are trying to decide between this and Game Dev Story, then I strongly urge you to go with Game Dev Story.
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