Need for Speed as a series has been around for about thirteen years now. With many different iterations and gameplay situations under it’s belt, it must be great for EA who still keep managing to push a new version out every year to their eagerly awaiting fan-base. In recent years the franchise has been pushed to its limits with numerous changes to gameplay mechanics and overall style. The games have become more of a cultural complement rather than simple ‘drive from point a to point b’ sorts of fun, with a-list soundtracks and graphic designers bought in to every installment.

You are eagerly thrust into the body of Ryan Cooper, an up and coming racer in a tightly knit racing scene. Unlike in previous Need for Speed games, which focused on the draw of unrealistic, illegal street racing and car modification, Pro Street focuses largely on the legal racing of a legitimate amateur who you will help rise to the top. There isn’t really a narrative as such, but the in-game voice-over is pretty confidant that the player really wants to get revenge on Ryu, the best racer in the region, simply because he sped off in a sulk after your character won his first race. Our relationship with the unseen voice-over character really should flourish as the game goes on, offering you complements for your achievements and encouragement to do well in upcoming races. Although the character could be analyzed for hours it just feels to me that the game could have done without the terrible voice acting and overly used slang and just let the player race and crash into stuff, rather than force this excuse for a storyline onto you.

Graphically, compared to it’s more powerful console-brethren, the Wii version doesn’t exactly fill the shoes of the big boys due to the smaller processing power of the Wii, and with the large amount of reused material in Pro Street, this can become a big issue after a while. Realistic damage is a nice touch to the game, also adding a tactical element to race days by making sure you earn enough to make a profit yet still maintain your cars. It’s not often though that a racing game with overly-repeated content can be criticized and I believe this attitude towards reusable content has been taken a little too far in this latest installment of the series by EA. Even in the later stages of the game, the racetracks still have this grey haze to them, which isn’t really the best way of showcasing the power of modern consoles, especially on the Wii, which usually flaunts it’s simple style and throws vast arrays of bright colour at you.

Although perhaps not as important as the in-game graphics, the menus truly help this game to shine for me. The cultural impact of the series can be seen most in the menu sequences, with it’s crisp buttons and highly stylized graphic art backgrounds, which really add an extra depth of interest to the title. Combined with the cutting edge ‘kitsune maison’-style soundtrack, outside of the game you bought it for is a stylish and fun experience, which you might not have expected.

With Wii games, it’s incredibly important to get a tight control scheme, which not only plays well but is fun and innovative as well. Not really being the kings of innovation (which is not always a bad thing), EA have decided to stick to a fairly obvious control scheme for Pro Street. Racing in the game is performed with the Wii remote acting like your normal game controller, on it’s side with acceleration defined to the 2 button and with the motion sensors acting as an emulated steering wheel. Although it works just fine and is quick and easy to get used to, the controller sometimes goes out of range much like other games which use the same control scheme (Excite Truck is a good example). When going around tight corners it’s easy to move the controller too far to the left or right and the system gets confused and you just end up veering into a wall rather than going where you hoped to. This sort of thing is clearly a technological program with the Wii remote rather than a fault with the game. EA could have helped by making the car movements a little more sensitive to your own movements, so you don’t end up turning the remote a full 360 degrees in frustration.

Although previous games have been criticized for having too many different play modes, Pro Street only really contains two different ways to play with the other being a drag race of sorts. You hold the remote vertically and shift up gears by flicking up. This is actually a pretty fun section of the game and turns out to be the most interesting part at least at first simply because the normal racing sections start off so incredibly slow and these drag sections really do require some good, decent timing to pull off properly.

The Wii version also doesn’t include the online components that are such a big selling point of the game on other consoles. This means that you cannot download extra cars or tracks and certainly can’t race against other people online. The Wii is capable of doing all of these things, yet it feels like many companies, including EA, are reluctant to insert these technologies into Wii software. With the huge amount of advertising in the game and the fairly large price tag, it is easy to wonder how much exactly of customers money is going into research and development.

Need for Speed has been around for quite some time and has built up a solid fan base, yet it still seems that EA haven’t quite understood the need for simplicity. The menus and play modes are a little difficult to get used to and understand at the beginning of the game, which can be a little frustrating. A good example of this is the aforementioned drag racing segments that will require at least two to three tries before you fully get the hang of the control and rules of the game. This could however be put down to the mechanics of the franchise which EA has created whereby their target audience already has a wide knowledge of the racing world and will be able to jump straight into the games largely colloquial terminology and speech.

With EA Games president Frank Gibeau already confirming the series will go back to its roots in the next iteration, it’s no surprise this entry in the series has not sold as well as previous games which were massive sellers a few years ago. It must be very difficult to try to maintain the basics of a series to keep current fans interested but be different enough to interest new players at the same time. Although the game is probably one of the best racing games available on the Wii, it is too easy to compare and contrast with older entries in the series. There is no reason though why racing fans cannot enjoy Pro Street for the Wii. It is definitely a solid game with realistic racing and a large and detailed career mode, but what EA need to realize is that Need for Speed shouldn’t be Gran Turismo, realism isn’t why many of us play video games, and sometimes, you just want to drive stuff, fast.

Score: 6/10