Video game number one hundred and twelve: Need for Speed Pro Street

Video game review number one hundred and twelve in my 365 Games in 365 Days project is"Need for Speed: Pro Street".

Let's say you have a successful video game series about street racing. Let's say your series of games features souped up cars racing around the city, occasionally outrunning a police officer or ten. Let's say you're thinking of making yet another sequel. What are the two elements you're not going to screw around with? Probably the races and the chases, right?

Wrong.

Need for Speed Pro Street takes the cars off the street, and (much to the delight of law enforcement I'm sure), also removes the whole "running from the cops" element from the game. Now...you race your souped up street cars on legitimate tracks. You wear helmets (because helmets are cool) and you try not to crash into things, because crashing is not something you should ever do in a car.

Pro Street is basically Need for Speed: Light. It's Need for Speed after the developers raided the suggestion box at a Southern Baptist Church on what might make their racing games better. It's Need For Speed: Fisher Price edition.

I could go on about how the driving engine sucks just as bad as Carbon, or how the first race you enter, you can win with a good 15 second lead (so long as you can keep your car on the track), but what would be the point of that? With what I've already told you, you now understand why you should never, EVER play this game. There are a dozen good track racers out there, and this isn't one of them. There are a bunch of better Need For Speed games out there, and this isn't one of them. This game is like Burnout without the crashing. It's like Halo without the shooting. It's Tetris without blocks and Pac-Man without ghosts. It's a group of bad analogies with no end.

Overall Score? 2/10. Terrible. Buy this one for $6.00 in a bargain bin and give it to someone you don't like for their birthday. Better yet, give them 6 lottery tickets that you've already scratched. Those might be more fun. This game is worse than Carbon, and that's saying a lot.

Achievements? I got one for taking a picture of my car, one for "Dominating" a match (which was much easier than it sounds) and one for totaling my car (which was MUCH harder than it sounds). I had to crash into fences for two laps straight before I finally turned my car around....and plowed full speed into another racer driving in the opposite direction. That description of the terrible physics should really tell you all you need to know about this game. That one sentence should probably save you what....40 bucks?

You're welcome.