Dec 5, 2007

We’re told EA are ahead of the game on this one. Ask anyone driving a bright pink Toyota with plastic bits glued to it and they’ll tell you: street racing is so last year.

As the street racing scene has grown in popularity, its identity as an illegal, marginalised activity has slipped in favour of big money track days and corporate sponsorship. It has the faint whiff of selling out to it, really. Fittingly, ProStreet is the legitimisation of Need For Speed - retaining all the marvelous tuning and customisation options from the previous games and races against grown men with names like ‘Gustavo’ and ‘Dominik-with-a-k’, but shifted from the open cities and policed streets of Most Wanted and Carbon, and onto the track.

As in touch with trends as it may be, the relocation does the series no favours, dropping the wide open action of the recent NFS games with fragmented race days interspersed with lengthy loading screens. The drag races are a minigame more at home on the Wii, drift challenges are 30-second non-events and the proper races are hampered by an all-new, apparently more ‘realistic’ handling model which sits among the NFS games as comfortably as a juggler at a funeral. ProStreet pulls every trick in the book to accentuate the feeling of speed and acceleration - widening the angle of view, blurring the trackside scenery and shaking the camera about like it’s mounted on a washing machine, but as soon as you hit that high speed that you need so much, the handling model collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

So intent is the game on conveying that breakneck pace, every car, it seems, exists in a state of constant panic which precludes them from turning into a corner or from accelerating along a straight without needing careful babysitting. ProStreet wants you to feel terrified by speed, and rather than engineer that fear with, say, tough opposition, demanding courses or a system which rewards risk, it places the vehicles on the very periphery of control. Every car turns like a battleship once the speedometer hits 60 and the smallest failure in speed management results in being flung from the track onto the jagged side of a mountain.