Street racing games are all over the place lately. With the success of series like Project Gotham Racing and Need For Speed Underground, it’s become clear that the forbidden thrill of speeding along city streets at obscene speeds, narrowly dodging oncoming traffic and careening around sharp curves is an experience that gamers want to take part in. Another interesting trend among this year’s games is the upswing in sex appeal, evidenced by games like The Guy Game, the upcoming Playboy: The Mansion, and even a resurgence of the Leisure Suit Larry series. Namco, makers of the Ridge Racer series as well as a number of excellent releases this year, decided that two great tastes must taste great together, and thus released Street Racing Syndicate (or SRS to its friends), an underground racing game with a heavy dosage of sex appeal.
The story’s fairly straightforward and predictable as far as racing games go. Your buddy’s been busted, and his crew needs a substitute driver to take over for him. That’s where you come in. That race serves as your introduction to street racing, and you use the winnings to buy your own ride and start taking on the big shots all over LA.
The main “Street Mode” takes place on the streets of LA. Scattered around the city are a variety of challenges which must be completed to earn the two commodities of SRS: Cash and Respect. Cash is used both for buying and upgrading you ride, as well as toward entry fees for various events. Respect unlocks events on the map; thus, you need respect in order to earn respect.
Earning enough respect also makes challenges available to obtain girlfriends, arguably the biggest draw of the game. At your hangout, you can choose which one of the girls that you’ve impressed to “hook up” with; hooking up provides a respect bonus, and chooses that girl to kick off each race for you. Additionally, winning events will unlock videos of the real-life counterpart of your selected girl dancing around to generic club music. I feel compelled to point out immediately that SRS is rated Teen, so what you’ll see is nothing more salacious than you might find on MTV on a regular basis. That said, the whole concept seems kind of flawed; as much as the girls and their videos is the focus of the game, gamers who are expecting something akin to what is available in something like The Guy Game are sure to be disappointed.
With that out of the way, the racing element of the game would need to be top-notch in order to differentiate SRS, and, unfortunately, while the racing isn’t bad, it is hardly spectacular. The races are more or less what one would expect from a street racing game, down to the respect points that one can earn by performing risky maneuvers during the course of the race. (Think Project Gotham Racing’s Kudos, only with bigger numbers on the screen). Otherwise, all the races are simple affairs; aside from the respect challenges which you must complete to win over new girlfriends (which typically involve different tests like checkpoint races or gaining a certain number of respect points in a short period of time), all the races in Street Mode require you to get from point A to point B more quickly than your competitors. It should be noted as well that there seems to be some rubber-band AI at play here (where the computer cars will start racing superhumanly well if you happen to be in first place) in order to keep the races tight, if not always fair. If this offends your sensibilities (which it ought to), then be forewarned.
To that end, you have a number of options available with which to customize your ride, depending on how much cash you have earned. There are a number of parts to improve both your ride’s performance and appearance, but the interface isn’t particularly user-friendly, especially for gamers who aren’t car buffs. The parts are arranged first by type, then by brand, and finally by individual part, but I never had any way of knowing if one brand is better than another, and there is no way to do any side by side comparison. In fact, the only way to see what the effect of a given part will have is to rely on a graph that reflects the car’s stats with the part applied. This is great, but it takes a second to load up, so it’s hard to do comparisons quickly between two parts, and the game also doesn’t show what the car’s stats are before the part is applied; in order to do that, you need to cancel out of the parts menu and then go all he way back in, trying to remember the current stats to compare them. All told, after initially upgrading my car, I rarely went back to change any parts; I simply found it to be too cumbersome.
In fact, the only reason I ended up returning to the garage was to repair my car, since SRS allows the cars to be affected by the wear and tear of smashing into cars and walls during the course of a typical race. The damage affects the car’s performance as well, though the effect is subtle, and damage is always tracked to the car as a whole as opposed to individual sections of the car, so the effect is never as dramatic as, say, blowing out a tire in RalliSport Challenge 2. What is dramatic, however, is how much it costs to get the damage fixed; often, especially later in the game with more expensive cars, repairing a car after a successful victory will wipe out most or all the money that was earned by winning the race. Since that money is needed to enter future races, the only recourse was to enter the free “sanctioned events” to try to raise funds for the umpteenth time before being able to enter the crew meets (the events that actually allow the game to advance).
This leads to my biggest problem with SRS, which is that it seems to work as hard as it can to keep the player from advancing. Most events require an entry fee, which is lost if the player does not outright win the competition. Should a player lose the competition, not only is he out the entry fee, but he has also damaged his car in the process, thereby draining even more money. Granted, there are opportunities to wager on individual races during events to make more money, but this generally isn’t enough to offset the severe penalty for losing an event. So what happens is that the player is caught in street racing purgatory until he has earned the necessary funds, banished to race the same handful of races over and over again until he has won enough to cover both the entrance fee and all the repairs incurred through such races. In general, the penalty for failure seems unnecessarily harsh; instead of extending the game’s replay value, it made me want to put the game down that much sooner.
The control seems funky as well, especially when compared with other contemporary racing games. I had thought that using the face buttons for acceleration and braking (X and square in this case) was a thing of the past, since they have been replaced with the more natural trigger buttons, but SRS proved me wrong. The right trigger is instead used for a nitro boost, which makes sense, but having those buttons reversed might be more natural. In general, though, it is less the button placement and more the game’s response that I took issue with. The cars either stick to the road like glue or slide around as though they were driving on ice; over-steer just a little in the later part of the game, and you’ll spin out almost instantly; I can perform the same moves with any car in Project Gotham Racing 2 or Burnout 3 and fishtail a bit, but end up making it around the turn. Combine the cars’ proclivity for spinouts with an oversensitive brake (I often found that few turns required to do more than simply let go of the accelerator, because the brake would surely result in a spin-out), and you have a recipe for frustration. This also makes drift turns, a staple of games of this ilk, extremely difficult, because one wrong calculation has you facing the wrong way.
Graphically, SRS is adequate, but it never really presents the sense of speed that other racing games do. Especially if you’re used to a game like Burnout 3, which accomplishes this aspect of racing very well; you’ll feel like you’re moving in slow motion while playing SRS. What doesn’t help is that most of the tracks look very much alike, as most of them take place at night in the same area. The tracks that break from the mold, such as the Storm Drain series, are quite refreshing, but these are few and far between. There is also a considerable amount of choppiness in the framerate, which hurts the illusion of speed as well.
The sound in SRS is decent, depending on your tastes. The soundtrack is mostly hip-hop with some angry rock mixed in for good measure. I didn’t recognize any of the artists, but the music isn’t bad, per se, even taking into account that hip-hop isn’t my cup of tea. Otherwise, the sound is fairly generic, with some uninspired voice acting and basic car sound effects to listen to over the music.
Overall, SRS is a fairly average racing game that seems to rely too much on its one gimmick of winning girlfriends and not enough on actually being a fun racer. Car buffs might enjoy this one slightly more than Project Gotham Racing 2 or Burnout 3 because of the customization options, but they might also enjoy Need For Speed Underground 2 or the upcoming Gran Turismo 4 more than they would this game. If this were one of the only racing games being released this year, I could see it being decent, but it doesn’t stand up to the competition. If you’re only going to buy one racing game in the near future, I’ve just listed four good purchases in this paragraph; buy one of those instead.
