Street Racing Syndicate, or SRS, is Namco’s entry into the field of illegal
street racing games. It provides all of the basics that you’d expect from a
street racer – challenge races for cash and reputation, car mods, city streets
at night, and hot racing babes – but does so in a way that feels pretty, well,
basic. The result is a racer that delivers its action without much excitement or
pizzazz, and a game that will fail to hold most gamers’ interest for very long.
The gameplay is pretty straightforward for the genre. Win races to earn cash
and reputation which can be used to buy faster cars and unlock additional races,
allowing you to earn more cash and reputation to buy even faster cars and start
the cycle anew. This formula works well for some very good racing games but the
racing in SRS can’t deliver enough excitement to keep this cycle from feeling
repetitive. In many racers you start out with a very basic car and you must work
to squeeze every last bit of performance and handling that you can out of it
just to have a chance to win your first several races. In SRS an average gamer
will have no trouble blowing away the competition right from the very first
race. The game does include a variety of cars from real-world manufacturers and
you can feel a difference in handling between different cars. However, this
difference does not necessitate much of a change in driving style as the game
has a pretty forgiving arcade-style physics model. As a result you feel that
race after race things pretty much play out the same way.
The game takes place in the cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Miami,
and between races you are free to drive around exploring and looking for drivers
to challenge by flashing your high beams. The cities are not recreations of
their real-life counterparts and there’s not much to do while driving around
except to stay away from police cars, so the exploration and street driving
aspect of the game doesn’t provide for much entertainment. You don’t even need
to bother driving around looking for racers as the game will allow you to jump
straight into a race, which you’ll find yourself doing more often than not. The
races take place on closed tracks which struck me as odd for a street racing
game. The tracks look great, making use of plenty of bright and neon lighting
and having a slightly wet slick look to them. However, there’s little variety to
the layouts which compounds the feeling of déjà vu each new race brings with it.
As mentioned above winning races earns you cash that you can use to upgrade
your car to improve its performance. SRS provides a large number of parts from
real-world manufacturers that let you modify everything from your spark plugs to
your muffler. Before you purchase a part you’ll be shown how the part will
affect certain areas of your car’s performance such as its acceleration or
braking. Gearheads will enjoy this feature of the game as they can tweak their
car to their heart’s content. Most gamers will find it hard to tell how much
each part will really affect their car or even what some of the parts even are
and in reality shaving a half second off the 0-60 acceleration time of your car
is not even noticeable when racing. At least you can also spend your cash on
things like neon kits, spoilers, and paint jobs…
Winning races and pulling off moves such as drifts and catching air will earn
you reputation points. Reputation will allow you to enter additional races and
also comes into play in the game’s highly touted racing babe feature. Earn
enough rep and you’ll be able to “buy” your own harem of street racing models,
although you’ll need to keep your rep up to keep them (there is no love in
street racing). You can select a model from your bevy of babes to have the honor
of dropping the flag at the start of your races or you can unlock short videos
featuring the women, but this whole aspect of the game feels more cheesy than a
quesadilla pizza. Even the most desperate of love-starved teenagers will have a
hard time forcing themselves to spend time with this aspect of the game. The
time dedicated by the developers to adding this feature to the game would have
been better spent working on the racing model and track design.
The game includes online support for races against up to three other players.
In addition to the usual race modes, SRS provides a pink slip race mode that
let’s the winner take the loser’s car. In theory this should be a very
interesting and exciting mode, but in practice surprisingly few gamers are
willing to risk the car they spent a lot of time building. Also it doesn’t help
things that the online races suffer from the same general lack of excitement
that the single player races do.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
66%. It looks good and covers the
basics of street racing, but the bottom line is that the racing is just not all that exciting.
