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.
RAM= 256MB
Graphics= 32MB
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