Need for Speed ProStreet is a change of pace for the franchise. Leaving the story-driven and more open world environment where you were chased by cops in Most Wanted and Carbon, this game goes back to the simple idea of just racing. It seems that EA Black Box likes to mix up the franchise every third title, but in this case they should have left well enough alone and stayed the course laid by the two most recent games in the series.
The first and most glaring problem is the unsteady framerate and constant pop-ins as you go around the tracks. Almost every time there are turns in succession the action starts to slow down, sometimes to a literal crawl that is totally unacceptable for any racing game. The other problem is pop-ins left and right on the track itself. Things outside of the track usually have no pop-in, but as you come up to turns you will see the yellow arrows pop-in on the horizon and not smoothly move toward you. There are even times where things will pop-in halfway to you hitting that spot. The overall graphics are nice looking, but the frame slowdown and the pop-ins make for a less than stellar feel to the game.
What this game loses in the decidedly campy full-motion video storylines of the last two games it makes up for in being a good, but not great, racing game even without taking the frame jitters into account. You play as Ryan Cooper, a guy who enjoys going everywhere with his helmet on. You go through a progression of race days that are set up kind of like the hit list from Most Wanted, but with more branches coming off the main tree. There are four Kings that you have to take out and each section is split into multiple track locations with multiple race types.
Grip racing, drag racing, timed section races, time attacks and the ever unpopular drift races are the types of races you drive through. An interesting part of the game is that you have to pick one car for each type of race (grip, drag, drift) and sometimes you have to pick a backup grip car. In each section you have to hit a certain amount of points cumulatively to win the race day. You can then go on to hit a bigger point level in order to dominate a race day and get even more cash for your trouble. After completing a race day as well as dominating the day you get to choose a card out of five that will be your special bonus. This could be extra money, adding a free car fix to your stash or other things.
The game is very tweak heavy and you will find yourself trying to find the best car for each race type and tune them from there. There is a lot of money involved in tuning up the cars and now that you have to worry about more cars at one time you can find yourself shortchanged pretty quickly. Along with this you will also have to fix any damage given to the cars during racing and you can choose to use a marker or use money from your own pocket to fix the damages.
Most of the fun in this game is found in the drag and grip races. At the beginning of a drag race you have to heat up your tires by holding down the acceleration button and fitting the gauge into a small yellow area and continue doing so to get maximum grip on your tires. With more grip you usually will be able to get a faster time. It is very difficult to constantly get a maximum grip, but the next step down is easily attainable. The rest of the drag race is spent with you shifting into the next gear when the bar hits the yellow section in order to execute a perfect shift which means you can get even more time shaved off. You go through three rounds trying to get the shortest time in any of the rounds in order to win the event. Cumulative time through all three rounds does not matter. This sounds boring, but it is honestly the biggest excitement you will find in this game with no police around to chase you.
The grip races are basically a standard race against up to seven other computer controlled cars through a certain number of laps. The key of course is to get first place to get maximum points, but this race type is the closest to a regular kind of race that you get in this game. The timed section and timed attack races are the same in concept, but different in execution. In the timed section races the track is split into four sections and it is your job to score the best time in order to move up to the top spot from your fourth place beginning. This type of race is very hard because you have to push your comfort zone into turns in order to shave off valuable time. The timed attack races are very simple in that your job is to get the fastest lap within the number of laps in the race. The cumulative time doesn’t matter here, only the fastest of your laps. The drifting game type is still the hardest of them all and is altogether annoying in its continued use in this series.
This game also adds online functionality to the mix. Once you are logged into EA Nation (you can turn the auto sign-in off if you would like) you can take any of your races and upload it as a ghost for people to race against. Along with this you also have all the same race types available for Xbox Live online play in ranked or unranked matches. Online play was pretty lag free and was somewhat enjoyable, but the drag type kind of loses its luster as you are waiting around for people to finish a round. The nice thing with online play is that all the tracks are unlocked no matter how far you are in the single-player part of the game.
