Review by:Tony Mitera

For a sport that gets so much flak about its inordinate number of left turns there is a surprising amount of depth to a race once you are the one staring down the track. NASCAR 2011: The Game does a great job of making the racing action feel engaging and the tension high, and offers a bevy of adjustable assists to let rookies and pros alike sprint for the cup. Unfortunately as you battle it out bumper to bumper you also have to contend with both minor and game-crushing bugs that severely limit the experience.

Career mode is a logical first stop in your path to glory, as it comes complete with a tutorial video that goes over some of the gameplay mechanics. Maneuvers such as drafting and bump-drafting are explained, which operate pretty similar to what you would expect. While drafting you gain a boost of speed and see subtle contrails coming off of the car you are following. Bump drafting still gives you that boost but also boosts the speed of the car in front of you. This allows your race team to work together to slingshot around the pack, but takes a steady hand and a prayer that the guy you are bump drafting doesn’t ram into anything.

While you draft or perform nearly any other action on the track you gain NASCAR Experience, or NXP, which cumulatively levels up your career rank. Performing clean passes will net you a small sum of NXP, whereas dominating a track or getting the fastest lap will get you considerably more. As you gain ranks you unlock extras such as paint jobs for your car, but they are largely fluff more so than any advantages or upgrades. Still, it’s a strangely compelling carrot at the end of the stick, which is the whole point of the system.

Regardless, once you are in the cockpit of your stock car the game itself does its best to come to life. Though the tracks are for the most part far from complicated in their layout the intricacy comes in the form of how you maneuver through it. The feel of your car as it carries its momentum over the track is outstanding, and the nuanced nature of doing so is both unforgiving and rewarding. If you are out front you only need to worry about clean lines and trying not to make contact with the wall, but getting stuck back in the pack is a different story. There’s a handy radar on the HUD that shows the position and orientation of nearby cars, but it does little to ease the nervously claustrophobic feeling that the whole thing is one collective mistake away from a massive pileup.

The game isn’t any more forgiving about when those mistakes are made, and doing so often results in spinouts followed by multi-car pileups. Assuming you aren’t the one getting clobbered these wrecks are exciting, and with a steady hand you can sometimes thread the needle and get through them unscathed. However, the race officials seem to be either drunk or sleepy in how they call the caution flags. In one occurrence there were at least ten cars involved in a massive and vicious pileup and nary a flag was to be seen. In another event of the AI calling it wrong there were times where cars barely traded paint before enough the caution flag began to wave. In an actual race contact can be made without causing a caution and likewise officials will flag up if they even see a piece of hose bouncing down the track, but somehow the game goes way overboard in both directions.