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*Red light* nerves start to show up in the form of shaking hands, *yellow light* palms sweat and heart beats harder and faster and HARDER and FASTER until *green light* GOOOOO! All nervousness subsides and adrenaline takes it’s natural place in your veins as you push your ride around the track weaving in and out of traffic swerving around tight corners barely missing the buildings that act as guard rails and keep you on course, all the while you can’t seem to get your girl off your mind so you put all effort into getting to the finish line to show her off in front of the baddest ass ride on the road!
“Hey big boy, you looking for a ride?” “Well duhhh...”
The career mode of SRS acts more as a role-playing game than a typical racing game and breathes new air into the lungs of the racing genre by filling in blank spots left by Need for Speed: Underground. SRS places you substituting for a driver who got busted speeding and couldn’t make a race. You were there, so you are driving, winning means you get enough money to buy your own street rod and enter races as you so choose. You can find racing hangouts in various places in the world of SRS, but you will need to meet certain conditions in order to take part in most races. Racing at organized meets aren’t the only way to race in the game, you can be casually driving around and see a car that has a “race me” tag over it, usually these guys are smart asses and you will enjoy handing them their “smart ass”. Cops will also offer a racing situation by chasing you down if you are speeding, hit another car, or generally piss them off. You can choose to run from cops (which is fun as all hell), trying to evade their line of sight thus leaving them clueless as to your location, or you can chump out and take the ticket.
Bacon isn’t the only meat in SRS, HELL NO! There is a smorgasbord of honeys littering the streets, and you can pick them up! Chicks that you happened to impress enough will accompany you to races just to wave the starting flag, they will also give you rewards when you do good things (rewards like dancing half naked for your enjoyment), me like to do good things.
The basis of SRS is getting “Respect points”, the more respect you’ve earned the more races you can take part in and the more goodies you get, such as cars, girl rewards, and more street challenges. You gain Respect points by racing or just by doing cool crap while you’re driving around town. Of course in my super fly, mega tricked out, fresh and clean Eclipse I gets the respect tossed at me, oh yeah... mad respect here.
Most of the first races are quite easy once you’ve fixed up your car, then you go and find other races where you are racing Skylines with N2O shooting out the exhaust and 700hp under the hood. It’s then that you realize you are not the big man on the road and more of a Ford Escort in a Mitsubishi Eclipse’s clothing.
Bling-bling like a mizzle fizzle fo shizzle.
You can trick out cars for an awesome visual treat. In the same way that NSF: Underground allowed you to pimp your ride SRS allows you to put a tight looking finish on your power laden rice rocket and here’s the coolest part, you don’t have to race for 50 hours to get the special part you need. All parts are all available to you in the beginning of the game allowing you to modify your vehicle right from the start... if you have the cash. There isn’t as wide a selection of parts and modifications as NSF: Underground but SRS does have all of the coolest parts and not the extra crap you need to unlock (20 different versions of graphical tearing to unlock sucked, and it took forever...) though you still need to unlock cars of course. Finally it has been done!!! A freakin’ damage model has been applied to a racing game that actually adds to the game and doesn’t make it suck. The damage model for SRS shows a graphical representation of the damage to your vehicle but not to a devastating degree. You won’t see doors fly off the hinges but you will see bent bumpers, hood damage, rear damage, and window damage. You’ll have to pay repair these problems and you’ll find yourself trying to drive smarter instead of using the guard rail as a faster way to turn (don’t laugh you know you’ve done it too). Overall the graphics are on par with the other street racing titles on the market, though having live video of 18 beautiful women does seem to give SRS an advantage in the “graphics” department even though some of them don’t dance very well, it’s still a welcomed treat to have something other than racing that is still racing related in the game.
Lower that damn noise you little punks!
You’d think that the person to say such a thing in the title would be an old crabby man, think again, it’s me. SRS has a decent soundtrack to say the least but some of the songs are just down right annoying. Some songs are played at certain points of the game, like this one rap song about prison sex and god that plays before the start of EVERY series race. I just wanted to shut the damn sound off until the race started, but that is only me. Maybe some people enjoy songs about prison sex and god, I’m not one of them. The other songs sound good and don’t take away from the playing experience, techno, Rap, and some heavy-metal sounding songs play in the background just loud enough to hear but not to distract from the race. Speaking of racing, the sounds are also splendid. You can hear the cars coming up from behind you so you feel that extra pressure to floor it and stop messing around you can also hear the many different sounds of the engines revving up, it’s an overall enjoyable experience. There is one final snafu, voice acting isn’t the best in the world, in fact it’s not quite good enough to want to listen to but hey what can you do?
TheGoodEvil’s verdict:
If you are a fan of street racing especially with Japanese cars then I highly recommend Street Racing Syndicate, not only for the cars but for the honeys as well. SRS is a very well made game with great graphics, great customizations, great extras, and good sounds. The only reasons I can see someone not wanting to buy SRS is if A). You hate to see good-looking women dance in front of you, or B). You dislike songs about prison sex and god.
The Goods:
Great detail in many parts of the game, what some call cheesy and shallow, I call a welcome treat; the girlfriends, great gameplay and replayability, nice cars, a role-playing effect, good engine sounds.
The Evils:
For a while in the beginning you KNOW you will win races, voice acting is not so great, songs about prison sex and god really don’t add to gameplay, some of the girls can’t dance to save their lives.
