NFS Pro Street - Final Version Review

[jtace]

Ok so I just got back from Vancouver, Canada after a day of playing the full version of NFS Pro Street on Xbox360 at EA's Blackbox studio. All eight of us had a good time, spent a lot of time playing NFS Pro Street and even had a little competition among us and even one with the devs. The devs stacked things in their favor of course, we didn't have much of a chance when they've been playing and setting up cars for months. lol But the competition between the 8 of us community guys was fun, lots of wrecked cars, and somehow Bojan managed to totally destroy us, you'd think he raced all the time on the xbox360, oh wait he does! Just kidding, it was a great time.


Career:
We got to play thru the career mode for the first time, I'll try to give a bit of an overview of how it goes and was setup. We started out with a video introducing us to the character Ryan Cooper and his fight to get into the Battle Machine racing Org. They introduce the street king as well, and you get the idea that he doesn't think very highly of us. Ryan's a hot racer from the streets looking to go legit and race with the best competition. They wind it up with you getting put into Ryan's shoes and you need to win one final GRIP race to win the raceday and get into the Battle Machine racing org.

Each time you get into a new racing org the first race is always a sponsored race, you get free cars, free repairs and the playing field is level, everyone racing the same cars, so you have to prove your driving skill to move on. Each new org introduction will also introduce you to a new racing mode. Battle Machine introduces drag races and if you win the sponsored race day you get setup with a free drag car. React will introduce Drifting and if you win the sponsored raceday you'll get setup with a drift car to start with, Superpromotion will be the start of Speed Challenges.

Ok so I won the introductory sponsored race for Battle Machine, and I got to choose between a Civic and a Cobalt for my drag car. Both relatively even front wheel drive drag cars that are decent enough to start out with. You will want to spend any money you win on either new cars or upgrading the cars you currently have. You will have to upgrade and make your cars better if you want to dominate race days. It's not too hard to win a race day but to dominate you have to be able to win in almost all the events, and you'll have to have top notch equipment to dominate.

Now if you love tuning you'll love Pro Street. You can get by with a minimum of tuning if you're not good, just save money and buy go fast packages, just like going to a mechanic in real life. Or if you like to get your hands dirty, you can tweak and tune and eek every last bit of performance out of your cars. With the in depth tuning and the autosculpting having an effect on performance you will actually want to go in and buy body kits, tweak them for the best performance, wings, hood scoops, etc. I spent a lot of time on this, was a lot of fun, but kinda kept me busy from getting as far as I'd have liked that day with the limited time.

I did make it into React's introductory sponsored raceday, barely, and got to try out drifting for the first time in Pro Street. Let me say this if you've not heard by now, Drifting and Drag racing are MUCH BETTER then last year. (thanks for keeping a producer who shall remain nameless away from them this year John! ) I didn't have enough time to get really good at drifting but it felt so much better this year then it did in the past, using real physics with purpose setup drift cars and you really were drifting around the track and it felt pretty good and accurate.

That's about as far as I got in career mode, we moved on to online and other raceday events and some competitions about this time during the day. You will get a good 25-40 hours out of the career mode. If you try and dominate every raceday you'll spend 40 plus hours. Oh and while they only spell it out with hints, you'll get to challenge the GRIP king if you start beating around 10 or so track records in GRIP mode, same type of idea for the other specialized kings.

Online Racing:
We got to do some online multiplayer racing with all 8 of us as well. First thing we did was an asynchronous raceday event with the producers. John kicked our butts, Darren was close but couldn't quite close the gap. I think they stacked the deck in their favor with the months of experience and car building they had in their garages. That's ok though it was fun. Nitrocide and the other community Orgs that you've probably seen will be trying to setup these type of events every week for everyone to compete in. They're working on getting us special pages and setups to do all this stuff working with EA's website. They're doing a lot work with the EA website to have profiles and stat tracking as well as photo galleries and such for each gamer.

Next we got to do some synchronous online racing all eight of us. The setup works well for the xbox360, but I'm a bit worried about PC gamers as it doesn't work as well for us. But on a positive note, they are employing Punkbuster, for those familiar with it, which will help prevent cheating. If that works as advertised and cheating is a non issue then PC gaming should do pretty well even with the questionable interface. Multiplayer is supposed to be all about your friends and setting up races with your friends lists, so if that remains true, then we could see some good racing for everyone. Pit controls for the racedays are one of my major concerns, you've got a list of races in each raceday and the leader is rotated randomly between the racers, I'm a bit concerned we may see a lot of new guys not knowing they have lead and end up racing the first race over and over again. I don't know if there is really a "leader" for the pit or exactly how they deal with griefers and problem causers, so that is another item that remains to be seen. But if that does end up being a problem, just add the 5 or 6 racers who are playing fair and fun to race to your friends list and setup a raceday just for them.

As far as races themselves there is online racing AI this year, so if you only have a partial pit, then AI cars will fill out the remaining 8 slots. The AI is only there to keep a full grid and provide some action, so you shouldn't have any problems beating the AI, worry about avoiding the AI and beating the humans. In multiplayer there is no totaling your car, if you wipe out, you'll be reset on the track automatically, which is good, it's no fun having your day end at the start of the race due to lag, a stupid mistake, or an idiot.

Damage and Tuning:
We got to feel out the final settings for damage and how it effected you. Damage is nice, you'll probably want to practice an unknown racetrack if you're prone to crashing and totally your car, because you do have to repair your car and damage persists if you reset the race. Honestly damage won't effect your racing that much, you can still race pretty much like normal with your car on heavy damage. Damage is meant to be a consequence of bad racing but not a punishment, they want you to still be able to race and run well with some bumps and bruises, but if you total your car the race is over! Don't worry too much though to start out, it's easy to get repair markers for damaged and for totaled cars, you can also pay cash to repair them if you have lots of money to spare.

Tuning is really in depth if you want to dig down into it. With blueprints and the tuning possible this year, anyone who likes to tweak cars or wants to learn will have blast with Pro Street, the options are endless and the autosculpting effects performance so you can tweak your drag to down force ratio with the spoiler, the hood of your car and the body kit to name a couple. I'm not a FnF fan really, but I enjoyed the technical aspect of autosculpting my car to get the most out of it.

Wrapping it up:
There is a large selection of cars, and yes there are a few I can't talk about right now, we got to see some things that we probably weren't supposed to. Tracks from all over the world, large variety and some very beautiful scenes as well. Top notch world design this year. I think this year is much better then Carbon was last year, the physics make for a rebirth of Drift and Drag, both modes really stand out as so much better then last year. I really wish they'd have put those into the demo, you'll just have to find out in the full version. Damage and smoke this year are done very well and add to the experience. I highly recommend getting an analog input of some type to play Pro Street with, joystick, wheel, or gamepad even if you play on the PC. I would put Pro Street very much as the best NFS game in the last couple years. Time will tell it's real place in NFS history, but a lot of time and effort went into making sure you don't just play thru and put the game down in 5 days, never to pick it up again. They want you to play it for months, until the next NFS game comes out in a year, and it shows.

Overall Score: 9.3/10


Post your thoughts and questions! I'll answer any questions you have, also I recommend checking out the Demo, it's out on all 3 major platforms, xbox360, PS3 and PC.



Other Community Day Writeups:
http://www.nfsunlimited.net/article/...preview_career

[Justin Martin]

What exactly is asynchronous and synchronous online? Is synchronous where everyone races at the same time, and asynchronous is some sort of group-based "best time wins"? Like a autocross, rally, or time trials? If so, that's a good idea for clans...

[jtace]

Originally Posted by Justin Martin

What exactly is asynchronous and synchronous online? Is synchronous where everyone races at the same time, and asynchronous is some sort of group-based "best time wins"? Like a autocross, rally, or time trials? If so, that's a good idea for clans...

Pretty much, asynchronous racing is when you setup a race day event just like any other in the game, and invite all your friends to race it. They can race at thier own times and not worry about finding a common time that you're online and you can compete for best times and overall scores for the different races and for the whole event. Great for clans, tournaments and casual online competition.

Synchronous is normal multiplayer, 8 guys at a time in a pit all racing. Asynchronous is competing in an event, but not necessarily at the exact same time online together, kinda like the track records hunt, each person could compete for a track record and it wouldn't matter if you beat it when the other guy was online or asleep. We've kinda always done asynchronous online competitions, but it's just never been so fully supported and easy to setup as it is now.