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Street
Racing Syndicate
Score:
6.0/10 It’s blindingly obvious that street racing culture has become
extremely popular over the years through movies like The Fast and the
Furious, and games like Midnight Club Racing II and Need for Speed:
Underground. Now Eutechnyx
has thrown their hat into the arena with Street Racing Syndicate (SRS)
for the Playstation 2. If
it weren’t for some half way decent track design, this title would be
a total wash. As it stand,
the title suffers from weak AI, the conspicuous
absence of certain car manufacturers, and the general inability to
provide anything fresh or innovative enough to buy SRS instead of any
number of similar, better crafted street racing games on the market. The
game is broken down into the standard mix of play modes including an
arcade mode for quick pick up and play races, multiplayer in a
split-screen mode, and a career mode (called Street).
The arcade mode is nice for those who want to pick from an array
of cars and get down to business, and the multiplayer is functional with
players’ environments adequately displayed, and plenty of tracks and
cars to hop in and go toe-to-toe with a buddy on.
However, most players will spend the majority of their time in
the career mode. Buying
cars and unlocking new race events, vehicles, and girlfriends is what
the career mode is all about. The
mode does include a story, but it’s so clichéd that most people will
want to skip it by halfway through the first cut scene.
Equally pointless are the various girlfriends that can be
accrued. These female
companions can be unlocked through completing various Respect Challenges
over the game that range from tailing another car without passing it,
completing a track in a given amount of time, doing race stunts, and so
forth. Unfortunately,
acquiring these girls does nothing for the player – I sense a pun in
there somewhere...think about it a few minutes, it's there – other than allowing one to pick up their girl of
choice after which she will be the flag girl for races, and allow the
player to see extremely lame videos of the girls dancing around in
various pieces of clothing. The
only things really worth doing in the career mode are buying new cars to
tweak, and unlock new races and vehicles. |
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The
problem comes in that the vast majority of the time there is no
challenge during the races. The
computer-controlled cars are as dumb as a post, and appear to run on
very set patterns. There is
never a sense of urgency during a race unless you royally screw up.
Even if it’s the first time on a new track, and you plow into a
few walls, this won’t spell disaster for a race because it remains
extremely easy to catch up with your opponents’ cars.
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This
isn’t to say that players can get away with driving sloppy. The game still has a couple of mechanisms in place to
encourage people to drive well: respect points and the fact that cars do
take damage during races. Respect
points function similar to the Kudos points found in the Project Gotham
series on the Xbox where players are rewarded for driving with style
(drifting around corners, getting air on jumps, and such).
Players will need to earn these points so that they can unlock
new race events, as well as the Respect Challenges mentioned earlier.
In terms of the cars taking damage, not only does this mean that
your ride will show big dents in it if the thing gets knocked around, it also means you’re going to have to pay for the repairs from
your own winnings. This can
get quite costly when your car is heavily modified. One
odd thing about the cars, though, is that Honda is nowhere to be seen.
There are plenty of vehicles to drive from Nissan, Mitsubishi,
Toyota, Subura, and other major car manufacturers; however, if you want
to zip around in a Civic or some such, you’re out of luck.
Most can probably live without Honda in the game, but considering
how popular their cars are in street racing, it’s a bit of a sin for
their vehicles not to be in the game. What
is nice about SRS is the track design.
The way the straight-aways and corners are laid out on the courses
has this silky smooth feeling to them.
Driving on the tracks is like soaring down a well-designed
waterslide: the sensation is smooth, fluid, and there aren’t any odd,
harsh corners that will jar you from this feeling.
If you don’t want to drive on this almost out of body
experience, there is also the option to just cruise around town, and
challenge random like-minded racers (just watch out for
the police while you’re doing this). Complimenting
the decent track design is equally decent controls. The button layout is very intuitive, and better yet the cars
respond very well. Drifting
around corners is fairly easy to get a handle on, and there were no
instances of over or under responsiveness from the cars.
My only caveat with how the cars handle is that they move exactly
the same regardless of whether the track is wet or dry.
One
other area of note in SRS comes from its visuals, because it is a very
pretty game. The lighting
effects are nice, but not overdone.
The animation is very smooth as well, giving a good sense of
speed, especially after working over the engine of your car a bit.
What is surprising is that even the buildings around the
game’s various cities have a good deal of detail also, as opposed to
many other similar games where the surroundings look bland. The
audio, however, doesn’t stack up nearly as well.
The soundtrack is very much driven (oh look, another bad pun)
toward the hip-hop crowd. When
the music veers away from this it’s still fairly uninteresting. The voice acting is also decidedly poor.
The sound effects, though, are quite nice.
The noises from the cars’ carious components sound very
convincing, and the screeches that are heard while tearing around
corners add a lot to the experience. Nonetheless,
there is very little reason to own this game.
There are simply much better street racing games on the market,
more worthy of your money. If
you want a racing game of this ilk for your PS2, just get Midnight Club
II or Need for Speed: Underground instead. Jeff Nash (September 20, 2004) |
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