Need for Speed: High Stakes

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Review: Need for Speed: High Stakes

It' s a boat-racing game.

That's right: boat racing.

Of course, the graphics suggest jaunts across international road circuits with expensive sports cars. But once you get behind the wheel of one of these purported cars, you'll realize you've been had. These things move as though they're skittering across the surface of a pond.

When it comes to a track, the cars are noncommittal. "I'm just not ready for a relationship," they seem to tell the road as they powerslide around hairpin curves like something from a console game or a Speed Racer cartoon. Watch the replays and you'll see the cars float over the ground, as if it were thrown in as an afterthought. When you try to pass another car, it shimmies back and forth as if it were on water skis.

Of course it's folly to expect realism in an arcade racer. The Need for Speed series has long been the epitome of arcade racing on the PC and PlayStation, but improvements have often been gradual. Case in point: High Stakes. This is essentially the same game as last year's Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit with a few improvements. Cars can now take damage, and there's a fun career mode and some new tracks.

But is it worthy of being released as an entirely new title? If you bought Hot Pursuit, you might be a bit peeved at having to shell out another $50 for what is essentially Hot Pursuit v. 2.0. Is it just coincidence that Electronic Arts has now decided to stop putting numbers on the end of the title?

However, these additions are significant. It must have been no small feat to convince the licensees to allow Electronic Arts to render their cars with battered polygons. I never thought I'd see the day when I could flip a Porsche 911 and watch the twisted wreckage burn.

In keeping with the arcade physics, though, the cars are super tough. You can drive them like stock cars with little ill effect. It's been an ugly irony throughout the Need for Speed series that they model some of the world's finest high-performance cars, yet they encourage you to sling them about like NASCAR racers, and the addition of damage hasn't changed this.

The career mode gives the single player game a solid structure, although it can get a bit tedious to have to race the same tournament a few times through to win enough money for a substantial upgrade. However, a good variety of race modes is provided, including elimination tournaments, races for pink slips (the eponymous high stakes races), and races with neutral traffic cluttering the circuits.

The Hot Pursuit races, in which you choose to be a cop or a speeder, sound better than they play. If you're running from the cops, their ability to adapt to your driving is pretty uncanny. But if you're playing the cops, it's pretty hard to pull a driver over without simply clogging the road with police cars.

Nevertheless, High Stakes should be commended for its sheer variety. Sure, you've seen some of it before if you've followed the Need for Speed series. But this is still one of the finest examples of arcade racing on computer.-- Tom Chick / GamePro