Review

The Need For Speed series has been going for a very long time and E.A. try to change things every year to stop it from going stale. Unfortunately, with ProStreet it’s no longer about what they’ve put in, rather with they’ve taken out as they have removed everything that was most fun about the series. This is the lowest point in the series since Need For Speed II!

Basically, as the title suggests, this is all about the professional side of street racing, an area recently covered to a reasonable level of success by Juiced 2. What this means is we get to play through a series of organised racing events, called Race Days, where you compete for cash prizes and to make yourself known. They are also presided over by the most annoying announcer in gaming history, fortunately E.A. have included a volume control for his inane banter.

Each Race Day features a number of set challenges taken from four main disciplines. Grip races are your standard circuit race with up to eight cars where your goal is either to come first or set the fastest lap, you’ll experience a lot of these and they will very rarely pose a challenge. Drag races are annoying as they feature a little mini-game where you heat up your tyres for more grip before each run. Speed races are flat out charges along an open road and pass through four checkpoints at the highest velocity. By far the best are the Drift races which you’ll need to progress through the first tier of career mode to access but are very enjoyable if a little brief.

Everything that made Need For Speed unique and fun has been stripped out, there’s no free-roam exploration, no traffic to weave through and, crucially, no police to evade. The car modification is not the draw it once was as it’s been done to death by countless other racing games and the option to spend your Microsoft Points on upgrades is extremely cheeky. What your left with is another, admittedly good looking, generic racing game with little to recommend it.

The one saving grace is the amount of online options available where you can take part in complete race days against other racers from all over the world. You can even put together your own race day from any of the challenges in the game or you can simply opt for unranked single events. What you can’t do is take your car designs online (if you can, I couldn’t work out how to do it), which renders the whole visual design part of the game a little bit pointless!

Both Need For Speed Carbon and, to a greater extent, Most Wanted were supremely addictive racing games where you could happily lose hours of your life and not even realise. Here, “one more race” is more of a threat and it take so long to get anywhere that I doubt if most gamers will get to see the faster cars.

Compete at the highest level of street racing? Hardly!

About the Review

Platform

Microsoft Xbox 360

Developer

Black Box

Publisher

Electronic Arts

Released

23rd November 2007