This fact really never changes, no matter how much you try to hide it behind such ‘window dressing’ as endless car customisation, different types of race events, apocalyptic crashes, fancy weather effects and varied locations.

Race Driver: GRID not only appears to acknowledge this ‘racing is racing’ fact, it positively embraces it. It puts its eggs almost exclusively in the ‘driving fast is fun’ basket, and chucks most of the other window-dressing ‘baskets’ we mentioned earlier out of the passenger seat window. Which is fine, so long as the sheer fun of the chase is enough to keep you plugging away at Race Driver for more than a couple of hours…

After all, while we rather haughtily described car customisation, lots of event types and the like as ‘window dressing’, if it’s done well we actually rather like it. In fact, we didn’t realise just how much we appreciated the ‘padding and frills’ in games like Project Gotham Racing and Forza Motorsport until we played Race driver: GRID: a game with less filler than a fresh air sandwich.

Well, obviously I’m exaggerating a bit just to get the sandwich gag in. Race Driver isn’t completely a one-trick pony. But for better or for worse, nor does it subscribe to the ‘variety is the spice of life’ school of thought. By the time you’re entering your fourth or fifth racing ‘season’ in GRID’s Career mode, you’ll likely be feeling as if the game is at best a two or three trick pony, even if those tricks are tidily done and actually quite addictive…

The Race Driver experience starts very well - easily well enough to distract you from the feeling of slenderness that creeps in later. For as with Codemasters’ Colin McRae: Dirt racer (with which Race Driver actually shares many, perhaps too many, affinities), the game interface is superbly presented.

You’ve got to love, for instance, the gently rocking shot of your garage that forges the stylish backdrop to the main menu screen, and the way the options are presented in bold, ‘3D’ lettering. Then there’s the way the game throws up during periods of loading slickly displayed stats you’ve run up while playing the game; the way picking cars to view/use takes you through a wonderfully cool – and intuitive – folder and sub-folder system; the way you can win sponsors and get their logos emblazoned on your cars; and the way you choose events via a gorgeous looking stack of beautifully designed event ‘tables’, complete with trophies that stand on any events you earn a podium finish in.

The extreme effort Codemasters has put into Race Driver’s front-end immediately gives the game character and excites you about the quality of the what’s to come.

Just as well, then, that the main game graphics don’t disappoint. In fact, as we’ll see in more detail in the graphics section, the game’s graphics are in many ways good enough to almost certainly cause you to crash out in spectacular fashion at the start of your first race because you’ll be too busy ogling them to spot that nasty corner coming up ahead.

Needless to say, such graphical prowess really does provide a perfect hook to lure you into playing more.

Car handling, on the other hand, will initially feel a bit weird to anyone used to the Forza or Project Gotham schools of driving. For using the game’s standard settings, at least, it’s really very forgiving for most of the time.

In fact, at first it felt too forgiving, taking away some of the adrenaline of hitting a corner with the perfect combination of speed and drift. But over time we started to really appreciate the game’s slightly ‘glued-to-the-track’ feel, as it had the strange effect of making races feel less like a battle between you and your own car and more like a real race against a bunch of other, decently intelligent and aggressive drivers.

Don’t think from this that it’s impossible not to spin out in pretty spectacular – and destructive - fashion during a Race Driver event, though. In fact, if you DO stray from the track, you are punished very harshly by the game’s mechanics, often wasting so long spinning aimlessly around that you have to just restart the race again. So there is, after all, definitely some incentive to take care on sharp bends – and with such incentives, as usual, comes that most important of race game attractions: adrenaline.

If you’re still thinking the handling sounds like it makes the game too unchallenging, then you should know that a tidy set of options are provided to make your experience tougher – with greater rewards coming your way if you still manage to win events with the tougher settings enabled.

You can, for instance, choose to deactivate traction control, go from automatic to manual transmission, turn off braking assists, and remove stability control. Or you can play in Pro mode, where you’re not allowed to restart a race within a multi-race event should you screw a corner up spectacularly. Or you can choose from a variety of difficulty settings that reduce the number of flashbacks available to you within an event.

Did we say ‘flashbacks’ back there? We most certainly did. For if Race Driver has a defining gimmick that sets it apart from other racers it’s the facility to pause the game and rewind the action by a few seconds mid-race, so that you can correct a racing line/overtaking decision that may have led to you crashing or spinning out.

If you crash so badly that you actually destroy your car, this rewind facility is presented to you automatically - assuming you haven’t already used up your store of flashback ‘tokens’. The fact that the number of flashback tokens you have is limited to a maximum of four adds an element of strategy to proceedings, where you have to decide whether to use up one of your limited number of replay options or save it for later when you might need it more.

Of course, die-hard serious race fans of the sort likely to adore Forza Motorsport are probably burning out their clutches in fury at the very idea of a flashback system. Could things get any less realistic and Petrol Heady, for heaven’s sake?!

But Race Driver makes no pretensions to being the world’s most definitively accurate racer. Instead it focusses – rather winningly, if you ask us – on pure fun. And in the context of fun, a feature like the Flashback system that makes a racing game slightly more forgiving and encourages you to try one or two really quite daring manoeuvres you wouldn’t otherwise risk seems like a really great idea to us. So there.

A little while back we talked about the fact that you can actually write your car off during races in Race Driver. And this fact actually forms part of a wider car damage system whereby every bump you have with another car or a side barrier adds up during a race, to the point where if you push things too far you’ll find that your car gradually starts to perform less ably, not turning as well or not accelerating as quickly.

The great thing about this is that it really represents a way to curb the race-destroyingly violent antics of less skilled drivers – be that yourself, or some accelerator-happy nutjob online. The bad thing about it is that getting right near the end of a Le Mans 24 race only to have your steering suddenly fail because you nudge a barrier just doesn’t seem like so much fun after all.

Actually, the Le Mans 24 monster races that mark the end of every ‘season’ in career mode are especially noteworthy, because to be honest, like other particularly long races in Race Driver, they’re nowhere near as enjoyable as the short races. Not least because there are potentially lengthy tracts of the race where the field has stretched out and you just seem to be racing solo, with no sense of being in competition with anyone else.

The longer you spend with it, in fact, the more apparent it becomes that Race Driver is a game that works best in short, sharp doses. Though ironically, the more short races you do in a session, the more obvious the lack of variety we alluded to at the start of this review becomes.

The collection of event types in Race Driver is essentially limited to straight races with 8 to 24 cars, ‘Touge’ events where you go head to head with one other driver in a straight (sometimes two-leg) race to the finish, demolition Derby-style stock car races, and drift challenges where the objective is to rack up ‘style’ points for drifting as extravagantly as possible around various courses.

Within this basic four-event scenario, it also has to be said that in straight gameplay terms, there’s really not much difference between the main race and Touge events. So really you’re down to three event types: racing, drifting and demolition derbys. And for me this just isn’t quite enough to satisfy – at least in the absence of other stimuli such as car adjustments (all you can do is change your paint job and sponsors) and loads of tracks to unlock.

Regarding this latter point, there are only 14 locations in the game, and many of these are accessible from pretty early on, removing one of the traditional incentives to play on that race games usually employ.

What’s more, some of the tracks are really pretty similar looking – albeit very prettily so - reducing the sense of location variety even more.

Continuing the lack of variety theme yet further, it’s also a shame there aren’t a few more cars for you to get your hands on. Although it will, admittedly, take you a while to earn enough dosh to buy them all, only 42 cars are available, which looks pretty stingy versus favourite racers like Forza, Test Drive Unlimited and Project Gotham 4.

With track/car/event variety not providing a particularly strong pull to keep you playing, pressure clearly mounts on the game’s structure to keep you interested. And it only partially lives up to that pressure.

The game splits its career mode racing into three tiers of escalating difficulty across three continents: the US, Europe and Japan. And predictably you have to earn enough ‘reputation’ points with the lower tier events to level up your driving licence to access the higher tier events.

While this might sound on paper like a reasonable formula for addiction, though, in reality the vast majority of the higher tier events you open just end up being more of the same; as in, longer races, or ‘grand prix’ series with more races in them. There’s seldom if ever anything really different waiting for you when you finally burst through to a higher licence, a fact which harks back to our concerns about lack of car and track variety.

Even the game’s ‘season’ structure feels tellingly unepic, with each year passing by after only three or four events, taking away the sensation that you’re really developing your garage and racing team in any substantial way.

One final little gameplay niggle we had with Race Driver: GRID on the PS3 concerns its controls. For the decision to make the R2 and L2 buttons the default brake and accelerator buttons really doesn’t seem sensible, as we continually felt as if our fingers were going to slide off during moments of duress. Furthermore, this default button configuration starts to cause real hand fatigue during any protracted racing sessions.

For all its flaws, though, Race Driver is certainly not a bad game - just a rather shallow one. And as such it should perhaps have been sold for a few quid less than a normal full-price game.

But hey; if you’re feeling flush and in need of some short-lived driving thrills to while away the rather game-light summer, then Race Driver: GRID won’t let you down.

Not that you’d guess this from the game’s graphical ‘specification’. For it tops out at a 720p HD output level, and Codemasters has opted to run the game in 30fps rather than the smoother 60fps.

However, sticking with 30fps has allowed Codemasters to deliver more graphical detailing, and this pays off handsomely in the accuracy, presentation and just plain beauty of the car models and tracks alike, especially during replays (which, tragically, you aren’t able to save). The night-time events in Japanese cites are particularly mesmerising, thanks to their combination of beautiful black levels, dazzling neon colour bursts, and immense texture – especially as all the detail hurtles by you with remarkable smoothness for a 30fps engine.

Codemasters has, inevitably, had to employ a little motion blur effect to keep the smoothness intact, but it’s calculated this to absolute perfection, ensuring that it only ever looks like a natural visual effect of driving bloody fast rather than a technical gimmick to hide a graphical limitation.

As well as all of its beautifully detailed cars and environments, Race Driver shows, as we noted in the gameplay section, a superb sense of visual flare in its up-front presentation, always going the extra mile to keep things interesting – even during ‘loading’ screens.

Do not take all this fine talk to mean that GRID’s graphics are anything like perfect on the PS3, though.

For starters, there’s quite a bit of shimmering interference going on over fine details and sharp edges, suggesting that the game isn’t using much if any anti-aliassing. This noise can even be seen on the lettering of the otherwise fine menu screens.

Also aggravating is the occasional appearance of some pretty nasty levels of screen ‘tearing’, where a horizontal line appears to momentarily divide sections of the picture from each other. This is particularly obvious during replays and at the start of races, before the ‘go’ buzzer sounds, but it also has an almost subliminal effect during races, joining with the shimmering noise in robbing the graphics of the emphatic crispness and solidity we might have hoped for. Hmm.

Another much more minor fault is that the GRID crowd models look very unrealistic if you accidentally get up close and personal with them. But then they are, of course, really designed to only be seen whizzing by at stupid speeds.

One or two of the tracks look a little short of distance detail too, a fact emphasised by the exceptional sharpness and clarity of the more near-to-hand objects.

But overall there’s enough evidence in GRID to suggest that if Codemasters can iron out the tearing and anti-aliassing issues, it will truly have a special graphics engine on its hands. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to sit in my Aston Martin DB9 and stare at some more gorgeously rendered cloud formations.

On the good side, it employs in-game Dolby Digital 5.1 throughout all your race events, and it employs it well. You thus get a really impressive sense of race ‘geography’; how close other cars are to you, and which side of you they’re attacking. The game also does a nice subtle job when it comes to revealing sonically differences in weather and track conditions.

Pretty good, too, are the throaty roars of the cars and the subtle fluctuations in engine noises – though we have to say we didn’t detect any Gran Turismo levels of car noise authenticity.

On the bad side, we found the game’s lack of musical accompaniment a real let down. The only ‘real’ song you get is the cool Queens of the Stone Age sample that runs during the opening video; there’s no in-game music available to you whatsoever. And man, did we miss this staple of driving-based titles like GTA IV, Burnout Paradise, and Project Gotham Racing.

In particular, the inclusion of a few bangin’ tunes might very well have made those dull long races we complained about earlier pass by much less tediously.

We also felt underwhelmed by the in-game ‘commentary’, which is pretty basic aside, perhaps, from the rather neat way both the male and female voices can actually say your name. Provided, that is, your name isn’t Cabbage or some other new-age shit and so actually has a chance of appearing on the long list of possible forenames the game provides.

For starters, the game lobbies are just as terrifically presented as the menus of the solo game, making the whole online experience feel – again - exceedingly slick. There’s a really great ‘democratic’ touch, too, in that you can actually vote with the other people in your lobby as to what race type and location you want to play.

Since the game was ‘patched, races seem superbly free of lag, too, and are genuinely exciting if there are enough players in the race to always give you someone to gun for.

We’re certainly not saying Race Driver’s online system is perfect, though. First, it uses the common split between ranked and ‘player’ (casual) games that we still don’t feel is particularly necessary – especially as this approach potentially limits the number of players available in each gaming ‘area’.

Second, our experience suggests that the ranked game servers aren’t particularly accomplished at putting you into games with players of similar abilities to yourself.

Third, it’s too easy for players to quit if a democratic decision is taken that they don’t agree with.

Fourth, there’s no split screen capability with Race Driver, and so you can’t take two people online via a single console.

And finally, the game doesn’t seem very adept at putting you into lobbies where games are about to start, so that all too often you have to sit in a lobby for five minutes or more while an in-progress race or race series concludes.

For all its undoubted flaws, though, with a pretty well judged ranking-up system to keep you plugging away, Race Driver’s online play ultimately delivers a likeable combination of instant thrills and long-term challenge.