The Fast and Furious game on PSP Review

Fast and Furious is a decent game, but it feels mediocre. In the game you get 3 types of races: Destination Races, Top Speed Races and drift. The drift controls are great, because the game seems to be centered around these controls. In Top Speed races, once you bough the fastest car and installed nitrous, races are just a waiting game. Nitrous gets you to top speed almost instantly. And since there aren’t obstacles on your way, you just hit the gas untill you’re done. But untill you get to buy the expensive cars, in Destination races especially, where you get curves, the car doesn’t handle that well. All cars seem to be rear wheel. And turning them doesn’t feel that great.
The game also has “free roam” but don’t get excited it’s of the bad sort. In the game you can drive on highways. And there are exit points on the highway. That’s it. That’s the free roam. Driving in a straight line on a highway untill you reach a point on the map. Doesn’t sound exciting, Right? That’s because it isn’t. There are several Car Dealerships and tune shops, on the map, but it’s so boring to drive alone on the highway, that’s why most of the game I used the fast travel option. Rather than driving to 8 different car dealeaships on an empty highway. As for cars, because the game takes place in Japan, most cars are japanese. But don’t worry. There are also plenty of american cars too. Know why ? Because the game has a wopping amount of around 100 cars.
The difficulty curve is also annoying. At first, you drive such a sluggish car that you wonder why the game is called Fast and Furious, and the more you progress, the more noticeable the difficulty curve gets. Some races are easy, while in others, you have no chance against the competition. But luckily you can race the same easy oponents again to win cash. And the game kinda forces you to grind the same easy oponents. Especially since top speed races are based solely on car stats. There’s no skill involved there.
At least one praise worthy element of the game is the customization menu. You can equip your car with body kits, rims, spoilers, vinyls of many different sorts.
Visually, I like how the game looks similar to Need for Speed Underground 2. But even if in some moments it remided me of that game, Fast and Furious is just terrible. The lense flares are too many and just get in the way, the camera shake makes things worse, and when you add the horrible sound effects the cars make, the experience just isn’t pleasant. It feels mediocre. Also even if you have 40 different race events, you will feel like you race on the same handful of tracks over and over.
This game, with the right budget, could have turned out into a worthy competitor for Midnight Club. But instead, even if it tries to make an effort to not get to that level, it reaches tie-in level performance. And you know how movie tie-in games are. And it’s just too bad, because you can feel the pottential of the game, but it gets overshadowed by the rather mediocre end result of the game.
It has so many things it does good, like the number of cars, the customization menu, and even the graphics to some extent, but the poor controls, empty world, disapointing free roam and repetitive tracks makes the game lose a lot