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Need For Speed ProStreet

More bumps on the road

Need For Street ProStreet is not a bad game, but it's not superb either, and there are some annoying bits that dragged down the experience for me. Initially the handling felt sub-par, with the car sliding around; I was almost ready to throw in the towel when I dug into the tuning part of the game, and tossed in some aftermarket parts. Adding racing parts also unlocks such things as adjustable suspension, modifiable gear ratios and other tweaks seen in numerous other racing games. After a small session of tweaking, I was driving a whole different car. It quickly dawned on me that ProStreet is very much duplicating the gameplay of Gran Turismo series - every car is initially presented with factory settings that are overtly crap for racing, but by just bolting on better tires, better suspension and some performance-boosting parts, the very same car can suddenly perform like you'd expect from a racer.

Mustang GT500 at the drag strip - just don't try to take corners with this beast.

Your cars are tweakable down to the shape of the bodywork - complete with wind tunnel to test the modifications.

The only annoying limitation I ran into with the car tweaking was the fact that you can't touch any of the settings of your car during a race day. So if you took a set of four cars to a race day, won couple of Grip events, then went to Drag racing, and then found out that your gear ratios are a mess, your only option at that point is to exit the race day; this means losing the progress you made by winning those two Grip races, forcing you back to the garage to tweak your gears and then start the race day again. I can understand not being able to purchase and swap parts during a race day, but you should be able to change the settings of your cars at all times.

Then there are the special races that force everyone to drive the same cars, and these "hot rods" are presented completely untuned. The AI is happy to drive them like this, but a human driver will have his hands full trying to slide around in stock configuration, and since you can't change any settings during a race day, there's nothing you can with these cars - not even the gear ratios or other minor adjustments. It's a good thing that these organizer-supplied car races are rare, and most of the time you can drive a properly tweaked car.

Another annoyance is the car selection: the game taunts you with supercars, such as a Porsche 911 or a Zonda, but you can't actually obtain any of them until very late in the game, and most of the time you are racing with far more mundane cars. I don't mind a racer where you drive ordinary stuff, but it becomes an annoyance when you are teased with far superior cars as a carrot, yet they are locked away for most part of the career, no matter what you do.

The game also "cheats" by first implying that you don't have to win every race - you can complete most of the racing days with a less than perfect record, unlocking more races. You can go for extra money and rewards by "dominating" - winning everything - but it's not required. But then, suddenly you face a "blocking" race day, where you are required to complete the day by dominating the races, effectively winning everything with good times and scores. So the career advancement gets blocked at regular intervals by races where you suddenly have to win everything, instead of just placing consistently well across multiple races. This is most annoying early on when you might have sub-par cars for certain race types - not a good enough Dragster in the garage? Sorry, you are stuck grinding more money in the existing race days until you can upgrade it to proceed.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Racing Modes & EventsPage 3: Gameplay problemsPage 4: Performance and VisualsPage 5: Final Thoughts and Scoring

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