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The Grand Tour Game’s Ambition is Greater Than its Execution
The idea behind The Grand Tour Game is a simple but brilliant one. Don’t just watch the show: play it. Arriving alongside Season 3 of the Amazon series later this year, The Grand Tour Game is a weekly episodic racing game that allows you to relive the challenges Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond get up to.
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According to one of the developers, who are working closely with the showrunners, the game will be spliced with footage from the show itself, aiming to feel like an interactive version of what you’d watch. For example, Jeremy Clarkson will introduce the upcoming challenge, but at the point the presenters actually get in a car, it’s you behind the wheel instead of them.
To call it ambitious is something of an understatement, because the show is known for its outrageous challenges. In Season 1 they raced across Nambia in custom beach buggies, pretended to be Special Forces and tackled an explosive assault course, and attempted to save the coral reefs using only car body shells. In Season 2 they tried to break the British water-speed record in a road-legal amphibious car designed by themselves, and attempted to solve Mozambique’s food shortage problem by driving fresh fish hundreds of miles inland on a pick-up truck, a motorbike and a second-hand Mercedes. The developer insists all of the challenges in season three will make it into the game, but if the examples above are the kind of thing to expect, I have no idea what the game will deliver week-in, week-out.
Drive the P1 off the track and Hammond will 'poo himself'.
The demo I played gave me an idea of what it could be like, but it also left me with countless unanswered questions. Based on the first episode of the first season, it begins in exactly the same way as the show, with Clarkson leaving the BBC for the last time, jumping on a plane and then climbing behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang and racing against Hammond and May through the California desert. It shifts seamlessly from TV footage to in-game, and suddenly you’re driving while Clarkson bleats expletives every time you make a mistake.
There were two other parts to the demo: racing around the Eboladrome - the Grand Tour’s equivalent of the Top Gear track – which is as straight up a driving challenge as you can imagine, with gold, silver and bronze medals awards depending on the hot lap you set.
The final challenge was nicknamed 'Hammond’s Clean Pants' and is based on one the episode's other races, driving around a track in a McLaren P1 – a car so fast Hammond might ‘poo himself’. So your challenge is to prevent that from happening, by driving a clean lap. Every time you skid off, Hammond shouts ‘Oh, poo!’ and you’re awarded a turd emoji. I couldn’t quite believe it either.
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Every time you skid off, Hammond shouts ‘Oh, poo!’ and you’re awarded a turd emoji.
Make no mistake, The Grand Tour can be puerile and childish, but it’s also some of the most astonishing, memorable television I’ve seen. The game, based on this demo at least, is definitely the first two, but has a long way to go to be the others. There’s no questioning the developers' pedigree, with staff members from the Burnout and Need for Speed franchises onboard, but the actual game I saw was decidedly average.
Visually,
it simply doesn’t compare to racing game benchmarks like Forza Horizon, both in terms of fidelity and polish, and often the commentary provided by Clarkson et al was jarring rather than adding to the experience. Handling was decent enough, but there didn’t feel like much of a difference between driving a BMW M2 and a P1 supercar, so quite how that issue will be resolved when tackling some of the show’s more ambitious challenges, which include trucks, bikes and so on, remains to be seen.
Split-screen multiplayer power-ups include speed boosts and sending text messages.
I was also shown split-screen four-player multiplayer, which is apparently designed to capture the camaraderie of the show. The reality is it’s a pretty standard four-way race, again around the Eboladrome, but with power-ups such as a speed boost (dubbed ‘More Horsepowers’) and texts, which flash up on the screens of your opponents, obscuring the view. It all feels a bit cheap, the exact opposite of the show.
I would like nothing more than The Grand Tour Game to deliver on its promise of recreating the show’s ambitious challenges every week, because that’s what I love about the series. Being able to play along is a thrilling prospect, but based on the little I’ve seen it’s a long way off right now, and there’s a whole lot of distance to cover between now and when Season 3 starts at the end of the year.