Review

NFS Porsche Unleashed is the epitome of 'bittersweet'. It's a sweet-looking game that left me feeling bitter. Ha! Seriously, though, it does certain things exceptionally well, and I can point at those and say, "that's why I play racing games." Other things it does, or more importantly, DOESN'T do, make me point at the game and say, "that's what's wrong with racing games."

Let's start with the good. Obviously, someone spent a lot of effort on this graphics engine. NFSPU is a great looking game. The lighting is nice. There's very little pure bill-boarding (using sprites for environmental objects). There's almost no LOD popping or draw-in (except for the rear view mirror). If you're using an out-of-car camera, you can actually see the driver in the car and even see the character shift when you shift. I mean, that's cool! I'll expect that kind of thing now on from racing games. For the most part, the texturing is good. Buildings, terrain, trees, etc. all look vivid and sharp. The inside of the cars is another matter, unfortunately. The last graphical topic worth noting is the visible car damage, which is very nice. Texturing is used to reflect some of the damage, and that doesn't work so well, but the mesh deformation is good. Bumpers, body panels, etc. crumple believably; lights get busted; windows spider fracture. All good stuff.

NFSPU also sounds good. The cars sound unique, and to the extent that I can tell, they sound like Porsches. They ought to, I guess. I imagine you don't get the Porsche seal of approval on your game without also getting access to their cars. On the whole, the game audio does come off sounding a little muffled and subdued, but the quality is still high. A nice touch is that when you're using an in-car camera, the audio adjusts to reflect the fact that you're in the car. Choose an out-of-car camera, and it sounds like you're outside the car. Again, very cool.

The game's standout feature, though, is easily it's interface, which is very accommodating. There are lots of camera options, a terrific VCR replay, customizable soundtrack, and lots of HUD options. I don't have enough experience with force-feedback to say whether or not NFSPU does it well or poorly. The feedback always seemed appropriate, albeit a tad understated (and I had the settings turned up pretty high). As evidence of the game's position somewhere between arcade and sim, it only uses a single axis for throttle/brake. The ability to use two axes (i.e. de-coupling the throttle and brake) would have bolstered the appeal of the driving experience, but I'm not going to knock the game too hard for its absence. However, the more I think about this the more I feel that there's no good reason for not having it, so I'll just move on before I get too critical.

So the summary at this point is that NFSPU is technically solid. It's well-implemented, looks good, sounds good, and does a good job letting you customize the controls. There're two big areas we haven't covered yet: the physics and the racing. Unfortunately, NFSPU doesn't fare as well in these areas.

I'm going to cover the physics first, since I don't have a lot to say. Basically, the driving simulation is too forgiving. Maybe that's not the best way to describe it. Too mushy? Too slow? Too soft? Describing how a simulation feels is like describing how something tastes. And like taste, it isn't necessarily right or wrong. For me, NFSPU's physics left something to be desired. Others might drive it and have a dandy time. It is a consistent simulation, thankfully. I had no trouble adjusting to it, finding the traction thresholds and learning the handling. The cars just never felt very responsive. I certainly hope Porsches don't really drive this way. Sluggish is another adjective I'm tempted to use. It's as though all of the performance curves have been smoothed. I can only assume that this was done in an effort to accommodate inexperienced gamers and I'm sure it succeeds in doing so to some degree. Unfortunately what it also does is castrate the game for anyone wishing to invest themselves seriously in the driving. Many other racing games address this problem through the use of 'driving aids' which assist with braking, throttle, steering lines, etc. that can be disabled or adjusted. NFSPU has no such mechanisms, or rather it's as though the driving aids are present and can't be disabled. To counter with a positive comment, however, I will say that the game does a nice job distinguishing the behavior of all the different Porsche models included. From the 1950 356 1100 Cabriolet to the 2000 911 Turbo, each car forces you to drive according to its capabilities, and the differences can be dramatic.

Now we get to the meat of the matter: the racing. This is what it's all about, right? Of course the simulation, which I just discussed, is a huge part of the equation, but the other piece of the fun equation is the conditions or context in which you're driving. This is where, in my opinion, NFSPU falls flat on its face, and to be fair, where most racing games fall flat, so NFSPU is by no means by in a group by itself.

Let me set the stage briefly before I rant. For me, driving games are a visceral experience. Sure, I like the gearhead side of the coin as well, tweaking things in the virtual garage, learning the performance curves and handling subtleties, but what really draws me to racing games is the thrill. I like it fast and white-knuckled. Driving is also a very moody experience for me, in that I generally get an itch to play a racing game, and when I play, I like to be able to just run with a mood that I'm in. This is why I hate it when racing games don't let me customize the racing experience. In particular, I want to be able to control the weather and the time of day. Why don't racing games ever let me do this? Motoracer 2 is the only game I've come across that let's me do this, and it is the single reason why I still play it, despite its downright crappy physics. I mean, in driving games you drive a vehicle. That's what you do. There aren't a whole lot of variables in that experience. Why do most games insist on monopolizing the few variables there are? It's like taking someone to a salad bar, but then making their salad for them. You want sunflower seeds on your salad? Too bad. You have to eat 7 salads before you get one with sunflower seeds. Don't like onions? Sorry, all the salads in this game have onions. I'm the player, damn it, let me play the way I want. What do you care if I want to make it a cloudy day, or race at night, or just race by myself with no other cars on the track, or race a particular car or particular track or.. whatever! Let me race the way I want and I'll come back to your game every time I'm in the mood to race. Maybe I've got 15 minutes to play while I'm waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. If I know I can get what I want in that 15 minutes, I'll fire up the game and get a couple of races in. Racing games should cater more to this kind of quick fix. For the love of god, don't throw out career mode, or series racing, or race day with qualifying, etc., but take the child locks off the cupboards and let me do what I want.

I'm sure you can deduce from this the fact that NFSPU doesn't allow for much race customization. Pick your car, pick your track, and that's basically it. Admittedly, you can pick how many cars are in the field, and whether or not there's civilian traffic. But there are only 4 tracks available for quick races. Four!!!! This is probably the single biggest reason why I'm done with this game. Furthermore, some of cars aren't available for quick races. Someone please tell me what the hell is the point of restricting access to cars in a racing game? I'm not talking about campaign, or career mode, or whatever. I'm talking about the click-click-race mode. As far as I'm concerned this is equivalent to the developers saying, "we don't want you to play our game." Well guess what? Mission accomplished. The notion of 'unlocking' tracks and cars is a stupid and archaic piece of game design. In this respect, I'm obligated to give another nod to Motoracer 2, which lifts up its skirts for you right out of the gate. All the bikes, all the tracks, plus a track editor. Depending on your priorities, that's enough to make up for the terrible physics.

I'm not being fair to NFSPU. I went off on a rant there that only marginally applies to NFSPU. The game actually makes most of the cars available for quick races. Thanks for the scraps. But there really are only 4 tracks available. There are more tracks in the game, but you can't race on them unless you're in the middle of the "Factory Driver" mode, or a multiplayer race. Factory Driver is one of two forms of single-player campaigns in the game, and I don't want to sound ungrateful because both really are pretty cool ideas. Factory Driver has you advancing through the team that test drives Porsches out of the factory, in pursuit of the Ace Driver role. It mixes track missions with 'skidpad' challenges. Skidpad is where you're out on a flat lot, navigating a handling course marked by orange cones. They're definitely challenging. The other single-player mode is "Evolution" which lets you race for money and buy/sell/repair/upgrade cars in your garage as you work your way through the years in Porsche's history. Again, on paper these are great ideas. Both Factory Driver and Evolution fail not because they're bad ideas, but because they're crippled by silly and inexcusable design decisions. For Factory Driver, the problem is that you can't ever do any of the missions more than once. Those skidpad courses I just mentioned - once you complete any given one, you can't get to it again. Who's idea was this? Here's this neat mini-game, off the beaten path from regular racing games, and you're basically locked out of it. Let me select from any of the skidpad courses I've completed and run it as many times as I want. Keep track of my fastest time. Hell - go the extra mile and let me design my own skidpad course. That's not rocket science! Furthermore, change the way the game treats a 'failure' of the skidpad challenges. I think that each driver on the factory team should have their high scores listed for each skidpad and the player's goal is to beat the score of the person above them in the team hierarchy. Occasionally, after you've advanced, maybe someone else on the team beats your time and you have to go back and "defend" it.

One potentially redeeming aspect of Factory Driver, which I mentioned above, is that there are unique road courses involved. Quite a few, actually. But again, once you complete the objective, you're on to the next. These tracks never show up anywhere else in the single-player game. You can't choose them for a quick race, you can't go back and revisit one that you were fond of. Does that make sense to anyone? Anyone?!

As for Evolution, the problem with it is twofold. First, there's the fact that there's only 4 tracks. I mentioned that above. Four tracks!!!!!!!! (I used more exclamation points that time.) Something about repeatedly racing 4 tracks over and over and over and over again as I'm supposedly progressing through 50 years of Porsche history takes the wind right out of my sails. The other problem with Evolution is that there is no characterization in the experience. The whole thing is just so dry and sterile. I just didn't care about earning the money for new cars so I could race the same track against the same faceless drivers. Give the drivers some personalities, like the team in Factory Driver mode, and then maybe I'll care. I can see developing a sort of rivalry with the better drivers in the circuit. Maybe during a race you'd find yourself tempted to sacrifice some car damage for the opportunity to beat someone who's been your nemesis, or you can try to get them to damage their top cars in the hopes of hampering their ability to upgrade or sell-up to a new model. Doesn't that sound like fun?! Oh well. Also - the practice sessions for Evolution don't use your chosen car. Oops.

The physics simulation isn't good enough to make up for the sterile game environments, the ridiculously low number of tracks, the lack of any driver characterizations, and the woefully insufficient race customization. Motorhead would be a decent counter example to that, as is Motoracer 2, each for different reasons. Motorhead doesn't provide a race environment any better than NFSPU, and it too only has a handful of tracks, but it's just so much more fun to drive. Just the experience of driving and racing in Motorhead is rewarding enough that the game gets away with its content flaws. On the other hand, Motoracer 2, as I've already said, doesn't offer a simulation that's necessarily more entertaining than NFSPU (in fact, it's less entertaining), but instead it just lets me race however I want to race. That goes a long way.

The nail in the coffin is the AI. As you can see in the scorebox, I decided to call it "benign". That's about as accurate as I can be. The other cars will get in your way, there's only so much space on the road, but there isn't anything very devious or challenging about them. Playing on the higher difficulty settings, I didn't have much trouble winning most races, despite the fact that NFSPU uses another trick older than dirt - forcing you to start at the back of the field for every race. In Factory Driver mode, some of the missions will have you dueling with the police, and they can be tenacious at times, but it's rare and for whatever reason their skill didn't seem to transfer over to the regular races. The most difficult missions in the game are ones where you have to complete a course within a specified time.

A note about the score of (0) for Robustness: the game wasn't buggy. Remember that a score of (0) means that in the end the game didn't distinguish itself either positively or negatively. There were a very small number of bugs, but the reason NFSPU didn't get a higher score is quite simply because it didn't distinguish itself in terms of allowing user content. That falls into the Robustness category. The game could've redeemed itself quite a bit had it come with a track editor, or let me get into the guts of the physics settings. Or here's an even easier one: let me provide my own driver image. How simple is that?!

Also, the score of (1) for immersion might be surprising to you graphics junkies out there. Well, immersion is more than just graphics. The bonus that the game got for graphics was negated by the sterility of the gameplay and the tracks themselves. That put the game at (0) but I went ahead and bumped it up because of the ability to turn the headlights on/off, customize the paint job on all my cars, put my name on my license plate, lower the roof on the soft-tops, etc.. I appreciate the little things.

One final comment about the score: I hammered the game pretty hard for its lack of documentation. For a pure arcade racer, I would have been much more forgiving, but NFSPU obviously has aspirations of being a more sim-oriented racer. NFSPU shouldn't provide the garage settings that it does without a proper description of what they are and how they affect the vehicle's performance and handling. Also - I think the game should have covered some of the basics of racing and maneuvering, especially for the purpose of preparing the player for the skidpad obstacles. I personally didn't know how to execute a 360° reliably, and would have preferred a decent tutorial, even if just in text form, of how to do it. (See the tips below for a description of how to do a 360°.) So I don't feel too bad giving NFSPU a good slap on the wrist for utterly neglecting its documentation responsibilities.

And last but absolutely, positively not the least: multiplayer. Pop quiz: how much fun is it to race with just two people? Answer: It's a trick question! If it's just you and your buddy, you don't race, because it's stupid, and it's stupid because you can't use AI cars in a multiplayer race!!! Is there some game-designer commandment which states unequivocally that "thou shalt not include AI cars in a multiplayer race"? Do they not play their own game? Racing is fun when there are cars to race against. However, if you've just got a friend or two and want to race, the inability to flesh out the field with AI-controlled cars renders the whole idea stupid. This is because what happens is that after the first mistake made by either driver, they basically don't see each other for the rest of the race. Do the game developers never find themselves in the office late at night working on bugs, and ask one of the other developers to join a MP race in order to test something? Because if they did, then immediately after the race, during which they only saw the other car for about 20 seconds at the start, they would say to each other, "man that sucked. We need more cars in the race." And one of them would say, "yeah, but there's just the two of us." And the other would say, "dude - I know, let's just use the AI." Apparently that scenario never happens. Or it happens and instead at the end the other developer says, "yeah, you're right, there's just the two of us. Oh well. I'll go back to fixing the anisotropic cubic-environment bump-mapped inverse nippomatics." It's important to note that it is in multiplayer that we find the missing tracks. There are nine (9) road courses available in multiplayer, which makes it even more frustrating that AI cars aren't available, since MP is the only way to repeatedly race over half of the tracks.

Is NFSPU fun? As always, it depends on you. It was fun for me until I found out that I couldn't play with the skidpad courses, that there were only 4 tracks for quick races, and that I couldn't fully customize the race conditions. The driving model just isn't enough fun to make up for these flaws.

Marketing Lies

• "Become a master mechanic and an engineering expert."

  
  How? Certainly not through the game or it's nonexistent documentation. For each part that you can install in your car, the game provides a 2-3 sentence description. That's the only information I ever found.

   

• "Nine European open road courses."

  
  Only 4 of which are readily available. Unless you repeatedly play through the Factory Driver mode, or have multiplayer races (likely by yourself), you'll never see the other 5.

   

• "Five closed tracks."

  
  All of which are variations of the Monte Carlo track.

   

Tips

• From the readme.txt: Press Alt-P to take a screenshot. Screenshots are stored in [Need For Speed]\SaveData, and named UNLEASHEDxx.TGA.

• From the readme.txt: Saved Replays are stored as [Need For Speed]\Savedata\*.rpl.

• Here's how you do a 360° turn:

  • Once you obtain sufficient speed, brake hard using the hand brake and simultaneously turn hard in the preferred direction for the 360°. The back end will come loose and you'll begin looping.

  • You'll quickly execute a 180° and be facing the opposite direction, but will still have momentum in your original direction.

  • As you're hitting the 180°, turn the wheel hard in the opposite direction of your initiating turn. This is the key to the 360°.

  • When you reverse the turn of the wheel, you allow the car to continue looping in the same direction, as it continues to dissipate its forward momentum. If you just left the wheel in the direction of the initiating turn, the second 180° would be in the opposite direction of the first.

  • If done fast enough, you can actually come out of the 360° with a fair amount of forward momentum. Experiment with when to come back on the throttle for the best results.