Need for Speed: ProStreet Xbox 360 review

Need for Speed: ProStreet for Xbox 360Compete at the highest level of street racing with Need for Speed: ProStreet. It’s no longer good enough to simply rule your local neighbourhood you need to dominate on a global stage. Build the ultimate battle machine, take it to multi-disciplinary showdowns and pit your skills and reputation against the world’s best street racers. This is your chance to prove that you have what it takes to be crowned the next street king.

System: Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, PC, Wii, DS
Genre: Racing
Release dates: November 13th 2007 (USA), November 23rd 2007 (EURO), November 29th 2007 (AUS)
Players: 1-2 (2-8 online)
Developer: Black Box
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Origin: Canada

Need for Speed: ProStreet Xbox 360 screenshot
Need for Speed ProStreet is your taste of the chaos of street racing. Pushing yourself and your car to the edge can lead to mistakes and this time those mistakes have consequences. Think swirling fields of debris, shredded fiberglass and heinously twisted metal. Every dent, every scratch and every crumpled body panel is a battle scar, proof of your commitment and competitive mettle.

Compete on some of the world’s most iconic racing locations – Tokyo’s Shuto Expressway, the Autobahn and the Nevada desert. The atmosphere is electric – complete with energetic crowds, photo-realistic cars and billowing smoke – all designed to embody the pressure and intensity of the gladiatorial challenge known as Show Down. Need for Speed ProStreet is the realization of the raw power, visceral aggression and intense rivalry that embodies street racing culture.

Watch the Need for Speed: ProStreet launch trailer.

So what are Need for Speed: ProStreet’s main features?

* Real, Adrenaline-Fueled Racing — Experience the raw power of steet racing with a brand new physics engine and feel the fire of competition with an intuitively refined AI engine that smartly delivers on real driving behaviors.

* Dominate Across All Racing Disciplines – Becoming the Street King isn’t about winning one single event. You need to prove yourself in four distinct styles of racing. Unleash the power of the beast in a reinvented Drag mode. Master the art of control with Drift, and experience the intensity and rivalry of elite competition with Grip Racing. Completely new to the franchise is Speed Challenge, an ultimate test of speed and control.

* Ride the Edge of Disaster — Street racing is aggressive and mistakes have consequences. Cars can be torn apart using truly advanced and comprehensive damage capturing technology. Witness cars colliding, metal denting, and debris billowing. To further amplify the realism, crash repercussions such as smoke, dirt spray and dust clouds can affect all racers on the track.

* Redefining Competitive Social Play –Packed with features that will amp the spirit of competition and create for the ultimate showdown between you and your friends. The rules have drastically changed making for a more intense and aggressive online arena.

* Performance Drives Results—Your machine doesn’t have to look like much – as long as there are secrets underneath that hood. For the first time ever, see the impact of the Autosculpt technology on performance – all in real time. Sculpt your cars inside a wind tunnel and choose from hundreds of real-world, aftermarket parts to build your ultimate battle machine.

* Share your Tuning Capabilities with the World – Once you’ve designed it share it. The all new Blueprints feature allows you to upload your visual and performance customization settings online. Once downloaded, you’ll be credited each time your design is used to dominates in a race.

* Photo Real Cars and Worlds— Boasts cars that exude power, menace and raw energy with their look and sound along with the most realistic smoke ever seen in a racing game. Authentic and relevant real world track locations and the best street drives from around the globe combine to create the most stunning racing environments ever.

Watch Need for Speed: ProStreet’s customization gameplay.

As a conclusion let’s rate this game on its fun-basis.

FUN FACTOR – 7.0
Too bad there’s no story, no police, and no open world in this game of the Need for Speed series. But that’s what happens when they make these virtual street races legal and plaster the roadsides with an absurd amount of advertising, it all takes away a lot of the fun. Especially when your car feels slow with you mostly racing slower cars, so the sense of speed goes lost. The online racing is a saving grace. And if you like tinkering with your car, there’s definitely fun to be had customizing it and then taking your car out for a spin.

Graphics – 7.0
The cars look good, but are mostly models from previous games in the series. The damage models are accurate. Sadly while playing there’s some slowdown from time to time. Crashes look great in slow-motion. As for the other “looks” department, ProStreet features some girls cast as characters in the game. Krystal Forscutt, a former Big Brother Australia contestant, and Sayoko Ohashi are starting girls.

Audio – 7.5
You can’t go wrong with all the revving engines and screeching tires, that’s just completely awesome. The soundtrack is fine, just nothing there that stands out. There are voice actors (professional race event announcers) which you hear throughout ProStreet’s career mode, they are: Jarod DeAnda (Big-J/Battle Machine) announcers live at all Formula-D drift events; John Hindhaugh (Roger Evans/React Team Sessions) travels around the globe hosting Radio Le Mans, and JBird (J-Mac/Super Promotion) is the official voice of NOPI.

Ingenuity – 6.0
Hope you like drag racing and drifting, because that’s the controls you’ll be mastering. There are four different game modes: Drag, Grip, Speed, and Drift. To be honest the controls seem slow, it’s freaking annoying to turn a corner, it’s that unresponsive (and unrealistic, which I thought the game was aiming for) and every car is like that. As for the online mode, in it you create your own race day (pick the location, race type and cars) and you can then play through a series of events in ranked and unranked matches, which works well with minimum lag.

Replay Value – 6.0
There are 55 cars (60 in the collector’s edition) from around 26 manufactures included in ProStreet. Only eight of these are supercars, making them relatively rare to obtain. All in all if you like the realistic customization of your car (with thousands of after market upgrades, both visual and for performance) and the by the book racing, then this might be a good time for you for a few hours. However, if you played any of the past Need for Speed games, you’ll likely end up feeling the series was never about realism and you should skip this game. Definitely try the Xbox Live demo before you buy.