Game Reviews

Fastlane Street Racing

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Fastlane Street Racing

Completing a personal challenge is the keystone to building character. Setting your own goals and working to improve yourself are what makes us grow. This is the kind of personal achievement and growth offered by meeting the stringent challenges of Fastlane Street Racing.

Trouble is, what we generally want from a high-octane racing game like this is to burn rubber in the competition's face. We don't want to improve our strength of character, we want to be able to flip the bird at other drivers as we recklessly tear past them in a blaze of petrol-powered fury. You're not going to get that kind of satisfaction here.

Each race begins alongside three other lead-booted drivers, but after the first corner – even on the first level – that's the last you'll see of these clairvoyant bastards until the beginning of the next race. Your only real competitor here is the clock. Considering how hard it is to make the majority of the corners without coming to a stop half-way around, it's probably no bad thing that you've got the lanes to yourself.

The prohibitive and hopelessly unbalanced difficulty level is made all the more disparaging by Fastlane Street Racing's other features, which are of the highest quality. Dynamic lighting accentuates the contours of the beautiful cars, while the scenery is comparable to the finest racers on PSP. The tracks whiz by at an impressive lick without ever slowing down.

The accelerometer takes care of steering, while onscreen buttons provide a brake and accelerator. But what makes Fastlane Street Racing different is the ability to powerslide on the bends. Activated simply by tapping the brake or by over-steering, the fast-moving cars begin to drift. On the few occasions when you correctly anticipate an impending corner (generally it's too late once you can actually see a turn coming), the rubber-dissolving cornering is mighty gratifying.

Besides the arcade mode, you're given a few unique challenges, such as reaching a checkpoint without pranging your car or a time trial that pits you against the clock rather than other drivers. This is essentially how the arcade mode plays out, however, since your journey around even the easiest of tracks is invariably spent in fourth place – pushing instead to make the checkpoints before the unforgiving time limit hits zero.

And this brings us back round to the harsh difficulty setting and subsequent lack of competition this creates. You'll see, within 15 seconds of a race beginning, that the computer-controlled cars have had their tyres filled with glue and are quite unable to make any mistakes on their perfect run. They put their foot down and go from start to finish on rails, while even after considerable practice the demanding requirement to flawlessly drift around every corner is way beyond the bounds of human possibility.

With a serious update overhaul to address the severely restrictive difficulty level, Fastlane Street Racing could soar ahead of the stiff competition, but right now it wins an above-average score on the strength of its amazing graphics and rife, yet unrealised, potential.

Fastlane Street Racing

A stunning looking and super-slick racer that's hobbled by a ridiculously unbalanced difficulty level that leaves the roads bare
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.