Need for
Speed: Porsche Unleashed strays from several conventions previously established
by the popular arcade-style exotic-car racing series. For one thing, like its
name suggests, Porsche Unleashed features automobiles exclusively from one
manufacturer. What's more, the game has a more detailed, more realistic driving
and physics model than its predecessors, though the game's realism is scalable.
And while Porsche Unleashed has a few minor shortcomings, it nevertheless stands
as the most ambitious game in the series since the original. As such, it'll more
than likely make you love the Porsche on the off chance you don't already.
Porsche Unleashed looks good enough to do justice to its prestigious German
sponsor. The game includes many dozens of different Porsche models from the
manufacturer's 50-year product line, and each one bears the unmistakable
curvature of a Porsche. The 3D car models are highly detailed: The cars all have
working turn signals, brake lights, and headlights, and when you look at them in
the garage, you can even check the engine under the hood, pop the trunk, or view
the car's interior. The cars shine in the sunlight and reflect street lamps at
nighttime, and they can also get noticeably damaged. You can clearly see their
independent suspension at work as they corner, thanks to the game's realistic
four-point physics model, and you can even see their drivers turning the wheel
and shifting gears. You can drive the cars from a 3D cockpit view, from which
you get a great sense of speed, but the cockpit view's limited visibility and
slower frame rate - as well as the muffled engine noise - make the cutaway
first-person view preferable, though you can also select from two external
perspectives. The cars in Porsche Unleashed don't look totally perfect, as some
of the minor details such as the door handles are part of the texture maps,
rather than part of the polygonal geometry. But such details are only evident if
you spend a lot of time gawking at your cars in the garage, rather than racing
them out on the streets of Europe.
The various courses in Porsche Unleashed look even better than the cars do.
Porsche Unleashed is the first Need for Speed since the original to feature
extended open-road courses in addition to closed-circuit tracks. The lush
natural scenery and subtle lighting effects give you a good sense of where
you're driving, whether high up in the mountains at morning or down low by the
docks at night. Some tracks offer alternate routes to take, and all of them have
plenty of peripheral detail that you'll only start to notice after you've
already raced along that stretch of road a half-dozen times. Put it all
together, and Porsche Unleashed looks fabulous. The car detail and the great
sense of speed you get from behind the wheel, in addition to the quaint
backwater European courses and even the game's stylish front-end menus make
Porsche Unleashed very classy, much like its namesake. Of further note, you can
easily adjust graphics detail and resolution to best suit your system, such that
you'll find a good compromise of visual quality and fast performance even on a
low-end machine. However, slower computers with less RAM will experience
noticeably long loading times before races and even between menu screens.
Porsche Unleashed sounds as good as it looks.
You'll hear authentic engine noises and screeching tires throughout each race,
along with realistic Doppler effects as you blast by your competition. You can
actually hear how powerful the engine is in each of the various cars you'll
drive, and you can gauge your RPMs just by listening, rather than by glancing at
the tachometer. Porsche Unleashed has more than a dozen fast, funky techno music
tracks that help set the pace, although the music might seem anachronistic when
you're driving a 1950s-model Porsche.
You'll get to drive the very first Porsches all the way up through its fastest
contemporary designs in Porsche Unleashed's evolution mode. The evolution mode
begins in 1950 and lets you compete in a series of tournaments to earn cash.
Each tournament takes place some years after the previous one, so you can use
your earnings to buy new Porsche models as they became available. The evolution
mode can be played as a serious simulation: You can tweak your cars' shocks for
ride height, stiffness, and travel, just as you can adjust downforce, brake
balance, and tire pressure, all to suit the road conditions. Porsche Unleashed
is easy to play with automatic transmission in beginner mode, but expert mode
can be a real challenge, as even the best Porsche is liable to slide out of
control off a sharp corner unless you're ready to brake and downshift around
each bend.
But even the expert mode is highly forgiving with regard to damage modeling;
you'll typically be able to recover even after a head-on collision with some
unassuming motorist, though damaging your car can directly affect its steering
and its other driving characteristics. You'll have the option to pay for repairs
in between races, or you can opt to put your car on the used-car market and hope
to make some money off it. Similarly, you can buy used cars as they become
available between races, and thus save yourself some money that you can use to
purchase lots of different custom parts for the vehicle. The evolution mode is
also a clever means of offsetting the game's learning curve, as the older-model
Porsches are a lot slower than the modern-day ones. The only problem with the
game mode's design is that it'll take you awhile to work your way up to the
Porsche models you're used to seeing on the streets, which can get frustrating
if you want to cut to the chase right away in the latest 911 Turbo.
If you just want to get behind the wheel of the
fastest car Porsche has ever made, then you'll prefer the innovative
factory-driver mode, in which you assume the role of a test-driver for the
manufacturer. You'll get assignments from various Porsche personalities,
including an executive, the chief tester, and even a rival test-driver, and
you'll need to complete each of these to advance to the next. There are around
three-dozen missions in all, and they range from standard test-driver challenges
that test your cornering and acceleration, to more unusual scenarios in which
you need to deliver your vehicle for shipment quickly and without damaging it,
to rally races, and more. Porsche Unleashed has no hot-pursuit mode like its
predecessor, but you'll sometimes encounter Porsche cop cars in the
factory-driver mode, who'll try to run you off the road one way or another. Some
of the missions are very challenging, but they're short enough and diverse
enough that you'll want to persevere through them all, if only to see what sort
of exotic car you'll get to commandeer for the next one. Fortunately, no matter
what car you're in, the game controls responsively regardless of what peripheral
you're using. There's even an option to set your joystick dead-zone to help make
your steering more precise.
In addition to the other modes, Porsche Unleashed lets you run a quick race
against up to seven opponents, and it also includes a knockout mode that's an
endurance match in which the last car around the track is eliminated each lap,
until one car wins. The quick-race mode lets you choose from the cars that
you've made available in the evolution mode in addition to a few select stock
models, which means that you'll need to spend a lot of time racing through the
ages before you'll have a wide selection of cars. Porsche Unleashed also
includes a history of Porsche that has photographs and even some video
advertisements of many of its famous cars. As of this writing, the game's online
multiplayer racing mode is still in an open beta-test phase, though Electronic
Arts is already starting to provide additional cars for download.
Porsche Unleashed is a beautiful, comprehensive, and highly enjoyable racing sim
that's suitable for just about any driving enthusiast. It makes no false claims
about the limits of its extensive features, so although it'll give you a chance
to experience what it's like to drive all the different types of Porsches from
over the years, it won't let you race those cars against their competition from
other exotic-automobile manufacturers. Nevertheless, once you get behind the
wheel of one of the high-performance machines featured in Porsche Unleashed,
chances are you'll feel no need to drive anything else for a long time.
System Requirements:
Pentium 200Mhz or equivalent, 32MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM, 3d
Accelerator, DirectX 7
Recommended:
Pentium 266, 64MB RAM, 2MB SVGA Video Card, 3d Graphics Accelerator
Summary:
Porsche Unleashed is a beautiful, comprehensive, and highly enjoyable racing sim that's suitable for just about any driving enthusiast.
Score:
8.8/10
Courtesy: GameSpot
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