Reviewed: October 12, 2006
Reviewed by: Justin Nixon
Publisher
Namco Bandai
Developer
Eutechnyx
Released: September 26, 2006
Genre: Racing
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Teen
8
8
7
7
7.4
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Two things that the gaming world is flooded with are customizable car games and movie-licensed games. Neither genre has too many star games. The racing genre is full of wannabe street racers and movie licensed games are, for the most part, always bad.
When Need For Speed: Underground landed on store shelves, racing fans couldn’t get enough of its fast-paced action. It offered a number of cars with tons of customization. You could add body kits, turbochargers, rims, and anything else you could think of. It was one of the first games that offered the feeling of being a true street racer. To this day the Need For Speed series still has the best street racers on the market. Many games try and replicate the same success, but few come even close.
One of the games that is trying to garner that kind of success is The Fast and The Furious for PlayStation 2. This game is not only a street racer, but it is also made from a movie license. This could either spell catastrophe or instant classic.
The whole reason that Need For Speed: Underground was created in the first place was the popularity of the original The Fast and The Furious movie. That film made a lot of people want to buy their own car and take it the streets, but since that is illegal most just settled with ‘Underground’. It’s about time that the original license puts their own game out there, and lets it fall into mediocrity.
It’s all here...almost. Everything that you’d expect in a typical street racer can be found in this game, and this is just your typical racer. All the customization features are here, the standard and expected race types are here. What isn’t here? Anything new!
When you first start this game up you can choose to just jump into a single race event where you can play against the computer or against a friend, or you can start a career. Either way you can pick from a lot of cars. In fact this game has a ton of cars to choose from. Not only are there a lot of different manufacturers to choose from, most of the cars have more than one model’s year to pick from. This gives you a huge variety of cars to pick from.
The career mode starts off like any other street racer. You only have enough money to buy an average car, nothing special. While most games only give you a choice of a few cars to buy at the beginning, this game gives you about 15-20 cars to pick from. It is actually a tough choice which one to pick because not only does it give you the horsepower but it also gives the torque and weight. A cheaper car may have a ton of horsepower but it could weigh as much as a house. In this respect there is some strategy to picking which car to buy.
Once you take a while and go over the possible choices to start with, you jump into the action. Like any other street racer you can either go straight to a race to make money, or you can go to a shop and pimp your ride or just by a new ride. Like Gran Turismo there are different stores for each manufacturer. Each manufacturer carries a number of cars sporting their logo.
Unlike some of the other street racers out there, when you trade in your car they actually take into account what its specs are. If you have spent quite a bit of money in upgrades you will get more money for it. This way when you are buying a new car, you don’t feel so guilty for how much you spent on your old car because you get some of that cash back when you sell it.
At the beginning money comes easy and upgrades happen fast. Unless you buy one of the more expensive starting cars you can probably get your ride over the 300 horsepower mark after only 2 or 3 races. It doesn’t stay like this the entire game though. After a while the money doesn’t come so easy and the races become more difficult. At a point, like most race games, the action starts to trudge along very slowly, and upgrades don’t come as fast.
The cars, for the most part, control very nicely. The addition of the weight factor makes the cars feel heavy like a real car. You’re not going to hit a wall and go flying 15 feet into the air. It just isn’t going to happen. It’s the same way when you hit other cars. In some games both your car and the car you hit go flying 15-20 feet in the air like pieces of paper, do a few flips, and land upside down. Don’t expect that kind of unrealism in this game.
The cars look great. Each car looks just like they should, and the textures are great too. The customizations make the cars look even better. On top of that, the lighting is great not only on the cars but also throughout the cities.
Although the lighting is good, the cities, for the most part, are kind of dull, but like most street racers of this type, you race at night so the environments are going to look a little plain. The shortcomings in the visuals are more due to the PS2 hardware than the game. Another sad example of a game visually held back by the PS2.
Like any other street racer, the soundtrack is mostly rap, which matches the urban flavor of the game very well. The car engine noises could be a little bit more varied but for the most part they sound good, although during races that have long straightaways the engine seems to level off and become a consistent humming noise. This can be especially annoying during the early races that only have straightaways where high speeds are reached early and sustained for most of the race.
For a PS2 title this game brings a lot of features to the table, but at the same time The Fast and the Furious fails to offer anything new. You have seen these same customizations, and identical race types in other street racers, but for a movie licensed street racer this game can stand on its own two feet. It’s a shame that this game didn’t come out sooner to capture the hype of the movie while it was still in theaters, or to compete with the Need For Speed series before it became the new standard for street racing titles.
The Fast and The Furious is by no means a bad game, but in a genre already flooded with countless racing titles it doesn’t really stand out or do anything new. At the end of the day it is just another PS2 street racer that just happens to be based on a movie licensed game.