Demolition derby has always been one of the lesser touched upon aspects of racing in Grid. I never even knew it existed in Grid 2 or Grid Autosport until I looked it up. Perhaps this was finally the time for Classic Car-Nage to do justice to the art of destructive racing? Not according to the trophies.
More on that shortly. As well as 5 new vehicles to thrash around 4 new track variants, the package also adds a brand new collection of events to the Grid story, which encompasses the new cars and tracks well, but unfortunately leaves everything feeling a little bit on the lean side for overall content.
Unfortunately, the disappointments don't stop at the lack of new content. There is an absence of any sort destruction derby arena - the best form of destruction racing - and we don't even get a new career mode branch. Even the 4 new track variants are limited to 2 existing locations in Havana and Yokohama.
The story is also pointless and just made up of a string of corny cutscenes featuring Valentin Manzi just talking at you - Harping on about how great destruction derby is in as many different ways to fill the gaps between chapters as possible. It's really forced and feels like they didn't have any genuine ideas for a developed story angle.
The AI is really wonky when it comes to course correction during demolition events too. Cars will pile up after collisions and just sit there stationery in the middle of cross junctions causing huge obstructions, or they just stick to walls, waiting to be moved by another car.
Damage models are also really underwhelming and don't give off a true sense of destruction that should be the absolute minimum in this type of racing. I'm aware of the restrictions that exist on damage models for manufacturer vehicles in games, but if it wasn't for a clearly labelled health bar slapped on the side of the screen, you wouldn't even be able to tell your car had been in such events most of the time. I didn't actively dislike it, but it certainly leaves much to be desired, which is a shame, because demolition derby is really fun when it's executed well.
Regarding trophies, there are 10 added here as part of this package, and the journey naturally starts with the new story branch.
There are 8 new events included, with 3 of the trophies awarded for completing all 8 chapters. The only requirement to progression is that you have to achieve the primary objective for each race, and this doesn't require you to win the event in the majority of instances. The most challenging objectives revolve around having to deal a certain amount of damage per event, which occurs in 3 of the 8 chapters.
For some reason, it's really difficult to deal damage, which is a huge irony in something focused around destruction. The points threshold for each of the events that require a certain number of damage to progress is quite high, and even when you absolutely plough into other cars, you don't seem to deal much in terms of damage. These events are the ones that caused me the most issues and halted progress. I ended up deliberately ramming into dormant cars on the track to improve my damage output as the tactic to achieve the points threshold in these events - By far the easiest way to accumulate damage.
The rest of the trophies beyond this are very straight forward, but you'll need to rack up some hard mileage to tick off all of them.
This includes the "Will you sponsor me?" trophy, awarded for Completing any Classic Car-Nage sponsor event. If the Platinum trophy has taught you anything, it's to make sure you pick this before you do anything else. You get 3 new sponsors to choose from, and the Achevee sponsor objective is probably the most favourable of the 3 options, though important to note it comes with a requirement to clock 99 miles in Classic Car-Nage cars.
Add a further 2 trophies awarded for reaching Tier 3 upgrades for both the Dumont Ute Pick-Up and the Beltra Hot Rod, which is another 70 miles on top for both combined. Then, for the icing on top, you'll need to accumulate 99 miles in the Beltra Frostbite ice cream van for another trophy in the list.
In theory, you could bundle the 99 miles for the Beltra Frostbite and the Achevee sponsor objective into one, and this wouldn't be a terrible idea, but even if you chose this approach, you would need to accumulate at least 169 miles to earn the remaining trophies. That'll cost you around 3-4 hours of aimlessly lapping the track of your choosing. Fun.
It would have been more befitting of the content to perhaps add some damage accumulation trophies instead of just requiring the player to drive a random number of miles. It's a little bit of an ironic twist of fate that a story that messages to the fanbase "Oh how we've all missed demolition racing" - and then goes on to implement a trophy list that ensures the majority of the time you spend on this package ends up being based around aimlessly driving around to grind miles just to earn over half the trophies in the list.
It's a complete swing and miss. The mileage trophies should never have been the focus of a package intent of reviving the art of demolition racing. It ends up doing a disservice to the genre and comes across lazy and devoid of ideas. The rest of the DLC has some seriously heavy lifting to do.
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