Pro Street Fails to Deliver

Introduction

After seeing the new EA Games commercial for Need for Speed Pro Street, the graphics and new game modes instantly got me hooked to purchase the game. After further research, EA Games has turned to Porsche to help revamp their physics engine and has attempted to create the most realistic smoke effects from burnouts. Along with those two upgrades to the series, EA Games also chalked up new light to heavy damage models for each and every vehicle available in the game.

After actually renting and playing the game, I was dumbfounded that EA Games flat-out bombed on all of their new “groundbreaking” features.

Game Modes

Drag Racing – This mode includes quarter mile strips, half mile strips, and a wheelie competition. Before each drag there’s a mini-game which requires you to skillfully burnout to obtain maximum grip. Although this feature is challenging and pretty neat, it ultimately becomes stale and repetitive. The actual drag racing is a good stab at a realistic drag simulation but it’s just not quite there. Right joystick shifting sometimes doesn’t catch, some cars pull to the left, and it can get to be frustrating. Wheelie competitions are snoozers if you can find the right setup in one of the drag vehicles available. Once you figure that out you are downright unstoppable.

Grip Racing – Basically the Grip competitions are just another name for a short circuit race. There are several available custom tracks for Grip competitions but they all seem notebook designed and unimaginative. Pretty much just pass your opponents and you claim victory.

Drift Competitions – Probably the worst of them all. Pro Street seemed to try to improve drift realism but ultimately made everything slow and choppy. When you drift it’s no longer fast and exciting. You simply start right into a turn with very little speed and basically hang on for the ride. The drifts are short, the amount of bonuses is slashed, and the lame factor is skyrocketed.

Speed Competition – Pretty much the same as speed trap races found in earlier versions of the Need for Speed series. Here you go out on very long tracks with wide turns and hold the gas pedal down for a few minutes. Although sometimes it can be challenging to stop your car from rolling like a barrel, once you get the hang out of it this game mode turns out to be a snoozer as well.

Career Mode – Instead of having an entire city to cause mayhem in and a storyline, Pro Street is stripped down to just racing and menus. Simply beat all the Race Day competitions in the Career Mode and that’s about it. The only other main goal of Career Mode is beating the Kings of each game mode (i.e. the Drift King, Grip King, etc.).

Online Features – Surprisingly, playing Pro Street online is well developed. Compete in any kind of Race Day competition at your leisure or in real time. You can also design your own Race Day with a mix of game modes available in Pro Street.

Physics

EA Games claims that Pro Street is their most realistic racing simulation game yet. That statement is laughable once you actually play the game. The vehicles are extremely reluctant to turn and it seems like you are driving a ten ton dump truck every track. There are very little differences in each of the vehicles available except between small FWD compacts and big body RWD muscle cars.

Pro Street also provides three available driving modes each determining the difficulty of driving and your opponents (Casual, Racer, and King). Casual brakes your vehicle for you, assists in turning, and makes your opponents incredibly easy, basically allowing you to hold down the gas pedal the entire duration of the game mode and win without even trying. King doesn’t help you at all and makes your opponents spank you each and every race (if you like to crash choose this mode). Racer is the middle of the two difficulties, which seems to be the choice of most.

Graphics

In Need for Speed Pro Street, the graphics are about the same as the previous release, Carbon but with additional damage modeling and new tire smoke effects. The cars are gorgeous while the scenery is muddy and blocky. It seems like EA Games has used the same engine for each modern Need for Speed release but just adds a couple neat features and slaps a $60.00 price tag on it.

The damage modeling in Pro Street is similar to what you would see in the Grand Theft Auto series. Panels can be damaged and removed and each corner of the car can be crushed in to a certain extent. Light damage appears rather realistic while the heavy damage looks very bland. Also, once your hood flies off, a very blocky, unimaginative motor is shown with very little detail at all.

Damage has a minimal effect on how your car performs and drives and is mostly there for cool cut scenes for when you roll your vehicle. Of course they look cool the first time, but about the fifth time around your vehicle doesn’t even look like one anymore, just a block on wheels.

As for the “breakthrough” tire smoke effects during burnouts, EA Games has been the first to attempt to perfect such a feature in a racing simulator. Yes the smoke wraps itself around tires and lingers for a bit longer, but it looks more like light cigarette smoke rather than dense, heavy burnt rubber smoke.

Car Customization

Again, EA Games has claimed that the new car customization system has been revamped adding plenty of new features. Again, they come close but it’s still pretty much the same as what you would find in Need for Speed Carbon. You can buy leveling engine upgrades, tune your car, paint each piece of your car separately, apply decals, and mold various body kits. But don’t expect to do all this from the get-go – you must make some heavy dents in Career Mode before even coming close to unlocking all the customization parts.

A cool new feature of the car customization however is the addition of the wind tunnel which of course lets you mold your vehicle’s shape to achieve the perfect amount of downforce. You can also test your car on the Dyno but instead of actually showing your vehicle go for a Dyno run, the game just pauses for a moment and gives you the numbers… LAME!

Audio

The sound effects are just what you’d expect from your run-of-the-mill racing title. Muscle cars sound a little deeper than the ricers, but they could sound so much better. If you really pay attention, when you rev an over 700 horsepower Charger, you expect a deafening roar but in reality all you get is the same engine volume as the rest of the cars that the ambience of something such as bird chirping can be heard over it.

As for the actual music, typical EA Tracks garbage that’s annoying as any other title they put out. Expect nothing new in that area.

Final Thoughts

Overall I’m very disappointed in this release of Need for Speed. After putting a couple hours in on the ol’ Playstation 3, I just felt that the game lacked polishing and was missing plenty of features or touch-ups that could improve Pro Street to at least make it passable as a decent release. I’d recommend Pro Street as a quick rent just to check out the drag racing, but it’s not worth the entire purchase just to play something that gets very old, very quick.