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I'm always looking for a good ricer game to mess around with, which is why I grabbed this. It was cheap, it was rice, if it sucked, it wouldn't be much of a loss. I'll cut the back story and get to the point. This game sucks. It sucks really bad.
The game does have some things going for it, such as an innovative career mode, where you interact with other drivers, add members to your crew, race rival team leaders for pink slips, gain respect from the other teams by doing things in certain ways, so on and so forth. It's also got a pretty good roster of cars, spanning from European sport compacts to Japanese high end tuners to classic American muscle cars. Unfortunately, this is where the list of good things ends.
The graphics are pretty nasty, all the track designs are uninspired and visually look the same, all set in "various" bland, boring environments. I put quotations around "various" because they're all the same, no matter if you're downtown, in Chinatown, or at the speedway. Everything, everywhere, looks exactly the SAME. The damage modeling is pathetic, the most visual damage being paint scraped off of your car. The special effects are nonexistent, sparks don't even fly off of the cars when you crash into things. (Which, by the way, happens a lot.) The only thing that I guess you could consider a special effect would be what I can only assume to be a flame coming out of your car's tail pipe when you hit the nitrous. And lastly, the car models and visual mods are all devastatingly lackluster.
Gamers from the past generation will appreciate the sound effects, since they were taken from classic games. The menu selection sound, for example, was taken from the first Gran Turismo, while the engine sounds were taken from... Pole Position... The rest of them were made by a small group of kids with analog tape recorders, breaking and rubbing things together in their garage. The sound of hitting the nitrous is one of them sneezing.
The soundtrack is punk rock, punk rock, and more punk rock. Personally, it makes my ears gush blood, and I turned it off before any permanent damage was done, but some people may actually enjoy it.
I can look past things like the above mentioned though. What really kills this game, just like so many others, is the control. It doesn't matter how powerful your car is, how many suspension and tire upgrades you do, none of the cars will do a single thing you tell them to. Say you need to make a right turn, you first brake and hope that the car doesn't lock up and begin turning in the opposite direction of the corner. Assuming it doesn't, you then turn into the corner. No matter if you use the d-pad or the analog nub, the following will happen: The car begins to turn slowly, very very slowly. Suddenly, it will snap in that direction, leaving you in one of three positions. 1: The car oversteered and ended up face first into the inside wall after the bend. 2: You tried to compensate for the initial slow reaction, but it kicked in earlier than you thought, leaving you face first on the inside wall before the bend. Or 3: The best case scenario, you somehow made it through the corner, and swerve back and forth trying to straighten out the car after you almost ended up face first in the inside wall at either location. There is also a fourth position you could end up in after a corner, which is that you tried to brake less so the car would understeer, but you instead ended up understeering into the outside wall. Really the only cars that are -almost- drivable are the FF's, so if you for some reason decide to play this game, stick with those whenever possible.
The gameplay suffers immensely from the bad controls. I tried to work my way through the game by myself for about 3 or 4 hours before I realized that I was never going to finish it. According to the game, my name is now Paul, because I downloaded a 100% save file just to see if the game got any better once you started unlocking all of the good cars. Unfortunately this was not the case. If anything, it got worse with the faster cars. I can only imagine that the person who uploaded that save file was forced to do it by some demonic force that threatened to kill him and his family if he refused.
I don't want to know what the poor guy must've gone though completing the showoff events. I think in all the times I've tried those, I've been able to pull off one single move, and only once, by the game's standards anyway. There were many times where I had known I completed a move, but the game didn't give me the points for it. Having a showoff mode in a game where the controls are this bad is just asking for trouble in the first place. Also as a quick little side note, there are actually races where the goal is to get through the course in a certain amount of time... Without hitting anything. This goes beyond asking for trouble and into stepping into an already raging war zone.
There are a lot of games like this on the market apparently not looking to actually make a good game, but to capitalize and profit on the street racing craze by slapping the whole tuner label on a driving game a nerdy high school student could make on his home computer. And it is just now that I realize what has happened to me... ****!!