After being delayed for a week, today I picked up a copy of Need for Speed: Pro Street.
I’ve only spent a couple hours with the game so far, but initial impressions are good. Graphically the game looks stunning, customisation options aplenty, and heaps of fresh cars to choose from.
The car list isn’t as extensive as Forza 2, but with a hot new Lancer Evolution and Skyline GT-R it hardly matters.
I’m surprised it’s taken this long, but Pro Street is the first game I’ve seen which offers 2 purchasing options when upgrading or purchasing your cars. Not only can u use credits you’ve earned in the game, but you can also spend Microsoft Point (i.e. real money). This could get expensive if you wanted to buy your favourite vehicle and trick it out with all the mods right from the start, but if you’ve got the coin, your car would rule!
A couple of down points I’ve noticed so far.. you can’t save multiple setups for one car, so your forced to setup your car for one race mode at a time. So if you spend the time to trick out your car say for Grip racing, then decide you’d like to drift it, well you’ll be losing your Grip setup. This could definitely have been done better.
Another pain point is drifting, certainly not the pickup and drift experience I was hoping for. It seems the on screen text like ‘poor drift’ has no correlation to how your actually driving. While learning to drift I was crashing all over the place, getting it completely wrong and I get a ‘going well’ message. The opposite was true once I sorted it out and landing a bucket of points, I got the ‘poor drift’ message.. just makes no sense.
Other than that, the games heaps of fun, the sound is done extremely well and surround sound is definitely a healthy addition to the driving experience. In first person-view (sadly not in-car), you can hear turbo’s spool like crazy.
More @ EA
