Kairosoft ongoing story of fabulous simulation games races on.
You’ve no doubt heard of Kairsoft’s other games in which you attempt to raise an empire with the help of a series of menus and expressive pixel art. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s unhealthily addictive and to cut right to the chase, Grand Prix Story really is no different. Instead of running a game development company or a spa you’re now instead charged with starting your own racing team, you’ll hire drivers, build and research cars and deal with contracts. The style of gameplay has a lot more in common with Game Dev Story than the more recent Hot Springs Story in that you’re not placing things in the main game window and you are instead back to controlling purely from the menus.
The added attraction to Grand Prix Story is of course the races where you’ll see your team race against several other computer controlled racers across a series of short tracks. These races are almost completely hands off, there’s no controlling of the cars or even any kind of adjusting of strategies (Like Gran Turismo’s B Spec), instead all you can do is trigger a boost if your racer has one charged. That’s not to say that the racing sequences serve no purpose, you’ll want to watch the race closely to see if you’re loosing too much speed on corners or taking too long to reach top speed so you can plan your next vehicle upgrade or even try swapping out some parts.
There’s a lot already going on in Grand Prix Story to keep you busy but with the variety of vehicle customization options, you’re going to have to have the right car for the right occasion. Some tracks are simple ovals where top speed is king, others present you with tight corners or poor road conditions that can make your award winning supercar crawl to the finish line. There’s a wide selection of body styles to choose from with their own strengths and weaknesses but each body style can not only be upgraded but equipped with a selection of parts. Parts vary from different engine sizes, to tire chains, to larger spoilers and these too can be upgraded and leveled up but you can only have so many upgrades attached to your vehicle at one time, so you’ll have to look closely on the weaknesses of your car and also the upcoming race. While all this upgrading, leveling up and parts can seem quite complex everything is presented in a simple way and it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand why you’d want to install this gear in your car, all you need to do is look at it’s statistics that clearly tell you what effect it’ll have, assuming that your engineers install it correctly.
There’s an awful lot to accomplish in a single playthrough of Grand Prix Story so it’s fortunate that you can take over any one of your vehicles and parts upon completion of season to give you a head start on the next. Even so, you’ll likely have seen all of the races and most of the vehicles by the end of your second playthrough but doing so will still keep you up late for many nights.
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