The Need For Speed series has been around forever and despite its age it has constantly remained at the top of the sales charts every year. Its fast-paced arcade style racing has always been addicting, but this year’s installment sees a drastic change in pace from previous releases. While it’s still the same in the sense that it’s holding on to the street racer style introduced in Underground, the revamped physics engine and the resultant lackluster races make it hard for ProStreet to compete with other next-gen titles.

Story

In case you haven't played any Need For Speed game in the last five years or so, the story delivers the same tale of rags-to-riches without offering any sense of achievement. You take the role as Ryan Cooper, an aspiring street racer with a handful of cash and a decent reputation. Instead of racing illegally on the streets, however, racing teams hold sponsored events called Race Days in which racers can compete without worrying about police.

Look at them tires, girl!

Ryo Watanabe is the self proclaimed Showdown King, and you'll have to defeat all of his minions before you get the chance to race him. The story is pretty cheesy and all of the "extreme" trash talk is a joke, so you really won't find yourself wondering about what's going to happen next. A better story would be nice, as it certainly helped Underground 2 and Carbon, but as it stands, you won't be losing hours of sleep at night wondering about the history behind these race days.

Street Racing as a Career

If you thought becoming a professional street racer was hard, ProStreet shows how it can actually be an incredibly lucrative career path to follow. The easiest way to make money is through Challenge Race Days, which are special events that don't even require you to bring your own ride. Instead, the sponsors provide the same cars for everybody, eliminating any unfair advantages so the winner is decided solely based on skill.

Any Race Day, challenge or not, consists of a combination of up to eight events across a variety of disciplines. You receive a score for each event based on how skillful you race and how much you beat the target goal by, and you also gain a cash prize for placing in the top three. You can dominate a Race Day by earning a set amount of points, and although it’s possible to do this without winning every event you generally have to have a strong showing. By dominating a Race Day you can unlock hidden performance parts and cars, as well as earn tons of extra bonus cash.

Surprisingly enough, managing your funds is actually important in ProStreet. In previous NFS games you still earned cash for winning races, but there was never a demand to have to spend your cash. For example, in Underground you could beat the entire game without even adding a new air filter to your car. Your opponents always had performance that matched your own, which actually made it easier to win without upgrading. ProStreet adds a new challenging element in that your opponents will get faster as your career progress, so if you don’t keep up, you’ll find yourself at a huge disadvantage. It’s great that EA did this because it encourages you to constantly update your garage instead of making it more appealing to just save up for the best car once you unlock it. While initially this is a turn-off because you can’t justify spending any money on visual upgrades, in the long run this proves to be a step in the right direction.

The career doesn’t progress overly fast, and if you take the time to dominate every Race Day you’ll get hours and hours of gameplay in. The only downside is that the races do feel like a series of loosely connected events, and it can get tedious if you grind out event after event without facing any real competition. While the increasing difficulty helps adjust for this, you probably won’t find yourself playing the career mode for more than an hour or two in one sitting.