Need for Speed 5: Porsche
Unleashed possesses one of the worst collision-detection routines
ever seen in a racing game.
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 canbuy 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 stockmodels, 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 advertisementsof 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 Requirement)
Processor= 733MHz
RAM= 256MB
Graphics= 32MB
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