For many people outside the US, Nascar is considered a joke. A sport where all you do is turn left and where ex-Formula 1 drivers go in the twilight of their careers. Eutechnyx however disagree with this and have released Nascar ’14 on Steam, Playstation and X-Box, but is it any good?
Eutechnyx has done a good job on the car models and the lighting effects (especially in your garage) look really good and the tracks are all fairly detailed, even if the crowd look very generic and possibly just painted seats (its hard to tell when your worrying about cars on every side of you). What is a little disappointing is the damage models. Even after an horrendous crash, all you see is a few dents, scratches and a slightly crumpled bonnet. You can turn 180 degrees, and plough into oncoming cars and your car is still in one piece; although it then won’t go anywhere if you have damage effect the performance of your vehicle enabled in the options.
Nascar 14 gives you the usual gametypes for a racer. Firstly there is the single player quick play allowing you to pick any track and car and get straight into a game with little fuss or a single season. You also have the obligatory Career Mode option and Eutechnyx seem to have deviated somewhat from the usual Career formats that games such as F1 or the GRID series feature in that it sets you up as the owner of your own custom team and not as a wannabe racer looking to work your way through the ranks. You then have to juggle research, sponsors and putting in a good performance on the track. Don’t get me wrong. Its nice to have the option, but I miss being able to try and grab that golden ticket and work with the greats. There is also a Highlights mode included that gives you the option to replay key events from the racing calendar and potentially change the outcome. If you’ve ever played a EA Sports game, then you’l know exactly what this mode entails.
Nascar 14 does have multiplayer included, but it appears no one is playing it on PS3. I searched repeatedly for games over several days, but only found one or two and they closed before I could ever join them. It does feature a split screen option if you want to get a friend around for some couch co-op and that’s a feature I feel is sorely lacking in games these days
The final menu option is paint booth, and its one that you can get seriously lost in if your not careful. You can begin layering colours, shapes, flags and brushes to your hearts content to create a car of your dreams and then use that car in your career mode or online against others (if you can join a game that is). Nascar lacks an option to share designs or download other peoples like you can in Forza.
So how does it play. Races open with a nice little TV style presentation before you begin your rolling start. Littered around the screen are various pieces of information such as laps left, time, speedometer; the usual stuff. However at the bottom of the screen you get what appears to be a radar that allows you to see where cars are in relation to you and although all of the HUD can be turned off to improve immersion, if your new to the series then you will probably need it when bunched up in the park and trying to defend your position. This information is also reiterated to you via your pit crew who chirp out “Two High”, “One Low” giving you more time to think about that wall of cars in front of you that is fast approaching.
Now having done all this to increase immersion, for some reason they decide to pull you away from racing when there is an incident for a slow to load replay before finally returning to another rolling start. If this was a pure owner mode, then I could see its usefulness, but when you’re driving it just pulls you out of the zone completely. After the nice presentation at the beginning of the game, its also weird that you just get dumped straight back into the menus after your race with not a cutscene to be seen.
Judging Nascar is really tough as it feels like for everything they did right, something else was done wrong. Great opening to races but poor finishes. Racing feels good, but crashes and replays are a let down. Cars look amazing, crowd looks like crap. I think its safe to say that its a good racing game that is knocked down from being great by an inconsistent approach.
