Need for Speed: ProStreet

Nov 26, 2007

For the past decade or so, the Need for Speed series has been all about illegal street racing, but Need for Speed: ProStreet completely sells out this most tantalizing aspect for some cheap (or, rather, extremely expensive) product placement. Fortunately, the racing aspect of the game is decent enough to merit this new installment and the new focus on race days provides a shift in venue from the classic open-road style of past iterations. Still, there's just something vaguely distasteful about allowing players to beef up their rides with real money by swapping Microsoft Points for cars and cash, but we'll get to that in a minute.

Smoking Wheel Wells

Need for Speed: ProStreet takes professional/illegal street racing and re-imagines the entire event as a modern racing tournament, similar in many ways to the style of competition seen in the SSX franchise. Rather than tool around town looking for races, the game is divided up into race days that collect a handful (typically four to seven) individual races into one main event. The result is that you basically accept races in packs, because once you enter a race day, you're in it until you win enough of the races or quit.

One of the things the race days enable ProStreet to do is factor in persistent damage to your car over the course of the day. This makes keeping your ride clean and shiny much more desirable, so fans of the old-school style of Need for Speed racing (where you bash your car sideways into tight hairpins that you'd have to slow to a near-halt for anyway) may find themselves displeased with the new focus on vehicle maintenance.

At the same time, while performance is somewhat based on how much you've banged up your car, you won't notice much loss of performance unless you seriously brutalize your vehicle and refuse to repair it over the course of several races. The system is strict enough to reward careful drivers, but forgiving enough that it didn't crimp our style too much (except that all of our carefully pimped-out autos looked like so many balls of wadded up aluminum foil by the end of any given race day). While damage doesn't impact performance as much as we had worried that it might -- to the point that, early in our career, we'd meticulously repair our vehicles after each race -- the look of the damage was simply awesome, especially when we'd watch our hood float into the stratosphere after a particularly tooth-rattling collision.

Burn Letter

When you get right down to it, though, ProStreet's racing is an interesting blend of the classic arcade style racing of previous versions and slightly more sim-y racers like Project Gotham and Forza. If you don't want to think, ProStreet will do it for you by shifting, providing best line indicators on the track (which also let you know if you're going too fast for an upcoming corner) and even upgrading your car without any input from you. On the other hand, if you are obsessed with the details, you can manage each of the aforementioned things yourself down to the tuning of specific gear ratios. Generally, we find ourselves coming down somewhere in the middle of this crowd (needing to add custom roof scoops ourselves, but not wanting to fuss with individual valve timing), but the point is that the game is competent enough to handle as much of the minutiae as you'd like.

In multiplayer, this translates into a kind of get-in-get-out mentality where you don't need to finish someone's entire race day if you just need a quick online racing fix. Of course, if you don't build your own race day, you'll have to race somebody else's so you might find yourself with a limited selection of cars or an unpleasant slate of tracks. Yet it's totally up to you how long you participate in a race day, so you needn't waste time with race days that don't fit your criteria. While we noted some lag in multiplayer, it seemed restricted to those racers with lame net connections.

As Advertised

The most troubling thing about ProStreet is the ceaseless torrent of advertising that is jammed down your throat at speeds previously thought impossible. We're starting to get used to the fact that racing games are essentially forced to canvass the track with as many logos as possible in order to give at least the appearance of realism, so we were noticeably upset to find that ProStreet pioneers brand-new ways to garishly grasp our attention.

Of course, individual parts come branded with various corporate logos, but that's to be expected since adding their name affords some degree of realism. The thing that irked us the most was when an endorsement appeared after we picked up an Achievement. That's right, in Need for Speed: ProStreet even the Achievements are sponsored, so you can't even rejoice in your astonishing successes without some random company that makes shocks and struts edging into your limelight.

Also prickly, in our opinion, is the option to purchase parts or cars using Microsoft Points. This is a dicey proposition to us because it automatically steals all of the glory out of having a nice ride by reducing the best vehicles to commodities available to anyone with a few extra bucks. Sadly, we were unable to resist the pull and purchased engine, drive train, nitrous upgrades and even a few cars for under ten dollars; however, the impact on our self-esteem cannot be measured by any financial statement. When you get right down to it, this type of microtransaction that swaps content for cash seems disgusting to us because it robs players of the joy of achievement... our Eclipse is worth less because we didn't have to work at all (in the game) to get it.

Vocal Velocity

Another side effect of bringing the Need for Speed franchise into a more professional-style racing circuit is that we now get a lame announcer to go on and on about... nothing. We're talking specifically about the Battle Machines announcer (Battle Machines being the first tier of race days) here, because some of the other announcers don't grate on our nerves as much as the Battle Machines guy. This chump yammers constantly about dropping his clipboard, how poorly we're doing in a race day (when we're not), how awesomely amazingly fantastic stoke-aroo we're doing in a race day (when we're sucking) and anything else that could fall out of your mouth if you had no valve on your imbecilic internal monologue. He sucks and is terribly annoying, but on the plus side you only have to endure his spastic commentary in the first tier... of course, it's so bad that it would be understandable if you quit playing before hearing any of the other announcers.

Last Lap

Although Need for Speed: ProStreet expends a great deal of energy pissing us off with its complete sell-out atmosphere, there's a decent racing game hidden under the patina of shame and crass commercialism. Really, if all you want is a racing game that doesn't ask you to think too much unless you are incredibly passionate about racing, then ProStreet is considerably friendlier than other racing sims out there. It's no Grand Turismo, but then it's never tried to be that realistic. Still, we lament the passing of our old style of Need for Speed where we'd squeal around town dodging the cops and dusting all comers. But tricking out a Mitsubishi Eclipse for the race track is okay, we guess.

Honestly, we still prefer Most Wanted to ProStreet even though ProStreet offers significantly improved tire smoke that actually wraps around the wheel wells of your car, because Most Wanted had cops that chased us and provided a really compelling reason to drive as fast as humanly possible. Somehow, without the incentive of resisting arrest (and with the incentive of unlocking even more commercials and advertisements) our interest in this franchise is beginning to wain.