Grand Prix Story Review

I might be biased towards the kind of managerial games that Kairosoft develops. With their first release, Game Dev Story, I easily spent two full days inching my way up through the game industry, creating my own console and eventually dominating the market. With their sophomore title Hot Springs Story, I learned every positive and negative building combination and created an impressively efficient resort.

What both of these games lacked (Hot Springs Story more than Game Dev Story), was a way of giving visual feedback to the player; allowing them to track their rate of success. With Grand Prix Story,  Kairosoft has solved this problem. Whereas previously success was a case of getting higher numbers or more money, Grand Prix is far more visual. Each race serves as a representation of how far you've come, and in case that wasn't enough, each time you beat your last time or improve a stat on a car higher than ever before, a golden little "best!" makes sure you are aware of that. It helps make gameplay feel more rewarding, and keeps you playing for just one more race. Very cool stuff indeed.

Like the two previous titles, you are in a managerial position. This time you're in charge of a racing team, and you need to oversee the hiring/firing/growth of your staff and the creation/upgrading/tweaking of racing vehicles and special parts. It's not really grounded in reality -- an in-depth knowledge of the racing industry probably won't help you much -- but that works to Grand Prix's advantage, opening up the game to people like myself who don't know a car from a very car-shaped rock.

Look, there're cars!

Grand Prix also manages to avoid the repetitious feeling of Game Dev Story. Players progress through a series of races through several different tiers. Early on, races are short and simple, and victory is a matter of building a solid car. Later, as off-road and icy-road tracks are introduced, it becomes a matter of keeping a variety of different cars on hand and making sure that the more specialized vehicles are still fast enough to be useful. The changes in track types keep the formula of building-racing-researching from becoming too stale, and provide a step up in challenge at the later stages. Actually, compared to the previous titles, Grand Prix Story can be punishingly difficult to progress through at times.

Like Hot Springs Story, Grand Prix Story comes with plenty of little secrets that only very advanced players will ever unlock. While an in-game help section explains some of the fundamentals, only trial and error and some blind experimentation will ever push you to the final portions of the game. There also seems to be the necessity to do a full play-through so you can carry certain things across to the next game in order to unlock everything, similar to Kairosoft's previous titles. While I had no problem with that aspect (I would have played it through twice anyway) the idea of forced replayability may throw some off. You'll probably know if you include yourself in that group.

CLOSING COMMENTS

I'm a huge fan of Kairosoft's managerial games, and Grand Prix Story is a worthy addition to the lineup. The aesthetics and concept are essentially the same, but the execution -- especially in how the game shows your progress -- is improved. There are still times where you will sit there passively (in fact, most races are 100% automatically driven), but if you didn’t mind the downtime of the other two games, picking up Grand Prix Story should be high on your priority list.