This year's been a bit of a downer for British motor racing fans. First we had the untimely passing of a rallying great, then Jason Plato narrowly missed out on the BTCC crown, and was followed by plucky Lewis Hamilton, who having taken the F1 tour by storm, stumbled at the final hurdle. (Okay, the final two hurdles, but who's counting?)
Enter EA with its follow-up to the highly rated
Need for Speed Carbon to help brighten up our racing season. Or at least make our daily commute that little bit more exciting. And the good news is that it's produced another fine addition to the mobile racing genre.
The
Need for Speed series has always focused on the more instant and glamorous elements of racing and glossed over the chin-scratching, oily-hands-and-head-under-the-bonnet anal side of things. This latest iteration is no different: the emphasis here is on implausibly protracted drifting rather than nailing the perfect racing line; on slipstreaming your opponents rather than out-braking them.
Your machine of choice – be it the rickety old Toyota Corolla or the cutting edge Nissan GT-R Proto, to name but two – will automatically accelerate, modulating its speed around corners. This leaves you to concentrate on steering and making full use of your nitrous oxide on the straights. As you would imagine, said nitro supply is finite and needs to be topped up constantly.
This is where the drifting comes into play. As you enter any one of the game's long, sweeping corners, a swift depression of the thumbstick (or '5', depending on which control method floats your, er, car) will send your ride into a semi-automatic slide. Keep your drift meter in the green and you'll gain nitro, as well as a healthy speed boost upon exiting the corner. Let the drift meter slide into the red, however, and it's 100-0mph in 0.5 seconds for you.
The real meat of the game comes in the form of the Career mode, which sees you speeding through three events containing three races each. The aim, quite simply, is to come first in each race – complete an event and you unlock a code for use in the
ProStreet console games, as well as access to the next series of events. Adding a little extra depth to Career is a suitably straightforward car acquisition and modification system.
Successful drifting also earns you hard cash, which can either be spent on upgrading your ride or on buying a more powerful vehicle. And if you're worried with regards to the modification side of things, fear not – you won't need to consult a Haynes manual before progressing to the next race.
In fact, all you need do is decide which of the four areas relating to your car's performance to upgrade. Will you choose to boost your top speed to help on those lengthy straights? Or perhaps you'd prefer to upgrade your handling to help negotiate those twisting bends. Each area can be souped up several times before you max out the car's potential.
Ultimately, the Career mode won't last you too long, but it will have you gripped for its entirety. The core racing action is thoroughly satisfying and manages to give the sensation of real competitive racing despite the necessarily automated nature of the system.
It's all wrapped up in a predictably polished EA shell, too. The front-end is stylishly realised and easy to navigate, and the car models are chunky and well detailed. Indeed, you'll be able to distinguish the Nissan 350, for example, by its aggressive lines without ever having to read its description. The only negative here is with the audio, which seems to splutter and loop in a most disconcerting way. He soon switched it off.
Pro Street will never win any awards for originality or longevity, but it belts along at a fair old rate – especially when using the faster models such as the Nissan GT-R – and succeeds through a beautifully implemented drift system that somehow imparts the rush of real racing through a tiny mobile thumbstick. In an otherwise disappointing motor racing climate, that's something worth celebrating.
Joined:
May 2008
Post count:
58
Need for speed has a great reputation on the console market and even on mobile it has come up with some really fantastic games. Never had you thought 10 years ago, you would be playing Need for Speed on your cell phone in 3D. It shows how technology has changed over the years and how the Need for 3D games (excuse the pun) has a huge fan base in driving simulation games. Need for Speed earlier games set the standards in authentic pocket game enjoyment. But what has the latest Need for Speed Pro Street has to offer this time around that it's predecessors didn't have?
Firstly the latest installment looks really polished in 3D. The polygons are pushed to the limit if you have a high end phone with good attention to detail. The graphics don't give a hint of chunkiness that would make the game slow down and the racetracks have varied bends and long stretches to showoff your car abilty on nitrous. Electronic Arts have done a great job in making the game feel realistic as possible. There are 8 cars to choose from and 9 tracks in total to unlock.
Like always there are modifications that can make your ride go faster all of which comes with a price. Challenging the game on career mode and winning the circuits guarantees you prize money and drifting plays a huge role in getting some extra dough to improve your cars performance and some Nitro for that extra advantage on your fellow opponents. You start with your Toyota Corrolla CTS, which in all fairness doesn't really appeal in the expensive sports car market, so it seems like the odd car out. But once you start to win races and begin to improve the stats, it gains some credibility in dominating the racetrack. The drifting aspect in this game is really good, earning you good bonuses and even more when you drift with your nitro activated at bends, which is a bit like suicide especially if your cars handling is not beefed up, you could flip your car continuously. A gauge will allow you to control your vehicle when drifting and timing is of the essence here to keep it sliding as much as possible.
The drawbacks of game, is that at some part of racing on career mode, you give up on saving your cash in getting some of the better sports cars on offer in the showroom. They are just too expensive to buy and ending up first in each race rewards you with meager amount of prize money, (not even the drifting helps your cause) and playing the circuits over and over again can get very monotonous. The AI is very easy to beat especially if you activate your Nitro all the time, your opponents struggle to keep up with you. There is no difficulty setting so you could make the game more challenging for hardcore drivers which is what the game really needs
