Juiced Eliminator

In the kudos-obsessed world of street racing, if you make yourself look a bit of a berk, your reputation's shot. Once you've ploughed into a pile of boxes like an idiot / stopped to let an old lady cross the road / turned up with the new Westlife album blaring out from your sound-system, you're finished.

Thankfully for THQ Wireless, the same isn't true of street-racing games. Last year's Juiced was not, it's fair to say, a marvellous game, as you may remember from our review. We'd stop short of comparing it to Westlife, but it was profoundly uninspiring.

That's ancient history though now, as the follow-up's here and it's pretty darn good. The basic idea is the same – race customised hot-rods through crowded city streets to earn cash and boost your reputation – but it's been shunted into THQ's garage for a thorough overhaul before being allowed back on the road.

The game is still a top-down racer, unlike its main rival The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, which comes in 2D and 3D flavours. The controls are simple enough – your car auto-accelerates, leaving you to turn and trigger nitro speed boosts. Oh, alright, you can brake if you absolutely have to as well.

Green radar markers show you where to go and give you advance warning of turns, although the 'gritty' (i.e. murky) graphics can make it hard to see exactly what you're doing.

A great feature is the way you can trash all manner of scenery as you race, from hedges and lamp posts to other cars – at one point we even bounced off a moving train! The feel is key to this kind of racing game, and Juiced Eliminator is suitably slippy-slidey as you roar round corners, bashing rivals out of the way.

Arcade mode lets you choose individual routes and race against other cars, although there's only a few tracks available when you first play. To unlock more, you have to play the proper Career mode, which sees you start at the bottom of the street-racing pile, with just burning ambition and a clapped out car to power you to the top.

A neat touch is the structure of the Career mode. Instead of going from level to level, you're free to roam the city looking for organised races or one-on-one duels. It doesn't change the game much, but at least feels a bit less linear than most driving games of this type.

Win races, and you get cash to spend on tuning your car's engine, transmission, nitros, body, wheels or brakes – or you can just buy a new motor. Meanwhile, as you earn more reputation points, you'll be taken seriously by some of your street-racing rivals, who won't race you until they think you're worthy.

Juiced: Eliminator is vastly improved over the original mobile Juiced, and it's clear that a lot of thought has been put into tweaking the gameplay with some innovative touches. That said, the dark graphics mean you have to learn the different routes rather than rely on your finely-honed twitch responses (or not, in our case), and the cycle of race–tune–race can feel a bit repetitive.

Juiced Eliminator

This racer is classy, not clapped-out. Boy-racing does pay after all.
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)