It’s not out for another two weeks but we’ve played the finished game at Codemasters HQ. Here’s what Keith Stuart managed to piece together after staggering out of a smoking Mustang…

From the glorified car show that is Gran Turismo IV to the vast free-roaming environments of Burnout Paradise, racing games are not really about racing anymore. They’re evolving into hybrid vehicular adventures, virtual worlds that just happen to be viewed through a windscreen. Race Driver Grid is an almighty swerve in the opposite direction.

The spiritual successor to the popular TOCA series, Grid is Codemasters’ new high concept take on the racing genre. You start as a driver for hire, working your way through lower-rank events, building your reputation and earning cash to buy new cars. Once you’ve pocketed £40k you can start building your own team, hiring and firing drivers as you scorch through three territories - USA, Europe and Japan - competing in different vehicle class competitions, from demolition derbies to touring car race days. Forget tuning and customisation, the emphasis is on what happens between the starting grid and the chequered flag. It is all about the experience of going extremely fast in an extremely frisky chunk of metal and carbon fibre.

The handling model is as diverse and exciting as the recent demo download suggested. Muscle cars can be swung through the streets of Washington like gladiatorial chariots, burning corners at hair-raising speed as rival fenders bump and grind. But there are also cultured raceways, where open wheel racers require a deft touch and expert racing line management – and that’s with all the driver aids switched on. However, Codies don’t really do super-anal, fun-crushing bore sims, so gutsy driving is usually rewarded. As senior producer Clive Moody points out, “the tracks are designed so that, for the brave there’s a line you can take and go full tilt, but if you get it slightly wrong, you’re finished”. YouTube is already buzzing with videos of near-perfect performances on the demo’s Jarama circuit. The dev team provided a ghost car lap of 1.15 as a sort of unattainable pace maker, but fans are shaving two or three seconds off that. The programmers are mystified, but this is a game that will reward those who pummel the tracks looking for the slightest exploits.

AI is similarly deep. The cars are competitive with you and each other, drivers make mistakes, some tire after a certain number of laps and get sloppy. You will, then, experience plenty of awesome crashes, aided by a hugely intricate damage model, which accurately assesses the force of impact on each individual vertex of the 3D model and calculates the deformation accordingly. This morning I was approaching a tight sharp hairpin on one of the Detroit circuits, when two cars zoomed past me on either side, collided and dramatically span off in opposite directions - smoke billowed, chassis parts went flying and a tyre barrier exploded, sending circles of molten rubber skimming over the track. An awesome sight. Each vehicle is apparently constructed like the real thing, the chassis made up of over 75 panels, beneath them, dozens of components. Every car represents about three months of work for the design team - the high-res interiors alone taking a couple of weeks each to build. Interestingly, a lot of this is outsourced to external designers – the in-house vehicle team consists of just three or four supervisors, making sure the quality stays on track – even if the cars themselves frequently don’t.

What really gets you is how alive the environments feel. There are up to 40,000 spectators in each location - they gesture and clap, they flit about. In San Fran you can watch them wandering across the bridge as you zoom by. Flags and bunting flutter in the breeze, neon signs flash, laser displays swoop across the skies. The lighting is lovely too, with beams of sunlight breaking through forest cover, and dusty hazes hanging outside of tunnel exits. The coders have developed new reflective surface shaders - they add a glossy sheen to the tarmac that reacts to real light sources. So in Shibuya, neon capital of the universe, the effervescent colours slip into the road and engulf the screen – it’s like driving through am eighties Duran Duran video.

Other cool stuff: the points you get for performing drifts and drift combos – they’re based on the judging criteria of real drift events, and the accuracy is assured by Hiroki “Sleepy” Furuse, manager of top drifting collective, Team Orange, who worked as a consultant on the game. He reckons real-life drift drivers will have an advantage in the game as the angles and speeds needed to get the best results on corners are as close to real-life as possible. I also love the front-end design, which uses your in-game garage as a backdrop and puts the menu text over the top as a set of 3D objects that seem to float in the game world. It’s hard to explain, but looks cool, equaling the lovely front-ends to games like Halo 3 and GTA IV. Finally, the Flashback feature, which gives you a limited number of chances to rewind from terrible crashes and have another go (a racing version of Prince of Persia’s rewind mechanic), works beautifully.

Out in two-weeks time, Race Driver Grid is a landmark game for Codies. It’s the first to use the company’s new Ego engine, which will power most of its forthcoming titles, from shooters to racers (Colin McRae Rally: Dirt 2 and the recently announced F1 title will be recipients). It’s also a real ‘next-gen’ showcase, chucking out sumptuous lighting, particle and physics effects with seemingly little impact on the stomach-churning speed.

And, of course, it’s beautifully honed. You don’t collect thousands of cars, you don’t drive the streets for hours looking to pick up racing challenges on the fly. You turn up at events, you race and you leave – for many of us, that’s still where all the real fun is to be had.