Do you enjoy watching a cars drive in 2 mile long circles over and over again, if so than you must be a fan of Nascar.
To start off with the review I want my viewers to know I am not a major fan of racing games but I have played enough games over the years to give a fair review.
The spokeman for this version is the Rainbow Warrior himself Jeff Gordan. There are many scenes where he will congratulate you or let you know when you did not meet specific requirements, unfortunately the messages are redundant.
There are various modes to choose from, which is racing and challenges. From the racing standpoint you can do quickrace or compete in each of the three cups. You can either choose to do race for the cup, nationwide series or truck series. You have the option of how many laps you want to do per race, it is based off of a percentage. For example you cna choose to run only 5% of the normal laps.
Now back to the challenges, there are a total of 77 challenges, they range from beating specific racers to going through a lap and miss the car pile up. These challenges span through many of the different tracks used throughout the different cup competitions.
By winning races and completing challenges you earn reputation points (which unlocks better sponsors) and performance points. Performance points are important because you can use them to improve your cars in each of the four track types (Speedway, Superspeedway, Short Track and Road Races).
You have the ability to customize the look of your cars, though the main things you can change are the sponsers and the paint job. There really are not many options so if you enjoy customizing your cars look elseware.
There use to be an online option but in standard EA fashion they shut down their servers. I find this to be unfortunate because there seemed to be a following of players that were continually playing online.
The music is somewhat diverse, but mainly consisted on country music and rock. I am not familiar with anything on the soundtrack but someone must be
. During the races your pit crew chief will talk to you, mainly telling you if someone is trying to pass you.
The graphics are done well, but the minor details like people in the stands are non-existant. While racing there are several different views available and you have the option for having a rear view mirror or not.
Last but not least the achievements are not hard but they are very time consuming. For example there is an achievement for winning 201 races, the least amount of time a race will take is about 10 minutes, so for this achievement will take about 34 hours.
At the end of the day I would say this is a fun game but lacks the depth of many other racing games on the market. The now unavailable online brings down the value of the game but I have decided I am not going to let it effect my score. Becuase there are not glaring issues with the game and there is plenty to keep you busy I feel it warrents 4 stars.
4.0