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The views available are excellent, with five positions to choose from, including an action-packed cockpit view (complete with a customisable bobblehead dash toy) and a nice tight arcade view that follows the action superbly while letting you view the road ahead at a particularly pleasing angle. The controls are simple with the Left stick used to steer, ZR to accelerate, ZL to brake and initiate your drift, L and R operate manual shifting, A boosts, Y looks behind you, and X changes your camera view. Each of these modes can be played in either Normal, Hard or Expert modes, with a difficulty spike around the expert entry that really hurts you badly if you make even a single mistake and fail to drift enough to replenish your boost bars. Overall you have four GP cups to get to grips with, starting out with Tour, Pro, Elite and graduating up to Hotshot. Depending on your play style you will get varying milages out of each car, however, if you can pull off some slick snake-like drifting, you can rack up serious kudos and gain more invaluable nitrous to boost you over the finish line. Each one of the four available to each racer contains a drift vehicle, a powerhouse, a nippy number and an all-rounder. The cars in this game are the defining factor in how you race. Starting out with GP1 "The Tour" I put the pedal to the metal and chose a car that would see me through anything, an all-rounder, so I opted for the BullDog. For my playthrough, I chose to represent my home country, the good old United Kingdom, with Aston, an over-the-top English gent with a stiff upper lip and a silver spoon wedged firmly in his cheek. This mode lets you pick from one of eight globally segregated racers each with four pseudo-recognisable cars to choose from with varying traits and attributes. To begin with, I jumped straight into the Grand Prix mode and wanted to ease myself in.
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