LA Street Racing

Despite it's setting, there's an oddly foreign feel to L.A. Street Racing. It's partially because of the laughably shoddy English used by your street-racing rivals in the game, but more than that, it's because you get the feeling when playing LASR that the developers have never really been to Los Angeles before. The result is a game that isn't bereft of high points--the feel of the cars being one of them--but also isn't able to transcend its numerous inadequacies.

LASR's single-player game challenges you to become the king of the L.A. motorsports scene by taking on a seemingly never-ending stream of challengers looking to knock you down a few rungs on the street racing ladder. This is not a bad concept for a game, but where LASR fails to inspire is in its execution. For example, instead of having free reign of the city, picking up challenges as you drive your whip around the town, you'll simply be parked in one of four increasingly prestigious sections of Los Angeles. As you sit there, challengers will simply pull up to you one by one and challenge you to a race. Or, often more amusingly, a challenger may cast a badly translated zinger your way, such as "I don't want to ruin your confidence! Now get lost!" Ooh burn.

Despite the lame insults, LASR manages to find a way to inject some intrigue into practically every race through a betting system, whereby both racers wager one or more parts from their ride against one another. These parts can be trivial, such as decals and body kits, or include more important upgrades, such as engines, tires, nitrous kits, or even your opponent's car. This system also ties directly into LASR's limited car customization. The only way to improve your car's performance is by winning performance upgrades on the streets. Beyond that, there's no way to tweak the performance of your cars. Thanks to a fairly wide performance gulf between the 10 cars you collect in the game, this system often proves to be frustrating and frequently unbalanced.

That lack of balance is mainly found in the cars you unlock late in the game. With one exception, the late-game models seem underpowered in comparison to the competition you face. As a result, you're usually at a distinct disadvantage at the start of every race, so unless you find a way to score a miraculous win or get lucky when your computer opponent makes a mistake, you're going to lose the race. If you made a wager, you'll also lose an important part for your car. Going up against these overpowered cars means you're very cautious late in the game, rejecting any challenge that you know you can't easily beat. Thus, you spend far too long just sitting there and rejecting all comers until the right challenge comes your way.

Worse yet, late in LASR, you'll likely lose every shred of racing decency you've honed over the years. Faced with the risk of losing your precious engine upgrade or level-three tires to an unfairly overpowered opponent, you spend your time not merely looking for ways to pass your opponents but rather to slam them into a wall. Or better yet, you look for ways to spin them around completely so you can get a clean break. It's not what racing games--even underground racing games--should be about, and it certainly isn't fun.

That's a shame because, at its core, there's an entirely acceptable driving model in LASR. The first-person cockpit view looks good, and you really get a feel for the different cars you collect in the game. For example, it's easy to tell the difference between a front-wheel drive car and a rear-wheel drive car. Better yet, each significant performance upgrade you make to your car is tangibly felt in its on-the-road performance, whether it's a noticeable jump off the line, thanks to a new engine, or better cornering around the hairpins with a new set of tires. While most of the damage to the cars in LASR is cosmetic, the cars will suffer performance hindrances after hard scrapes. On the down side, even the most dramatic crashes in the game feature audio effects that sound like someone vigorously slapped a lunchbox with a fork. But damage is just an afterthought because you can pause the game and choose the "rescue and repair" option at any time to instantly get your car back to full racing trim.

The artificial intelligence in LASR is characterized by mostly brain-dead opponent cars that are completely willing to slam into you and, at the same time, aren't completely able to cope with their own power late in the game. It isn't unusual, when running on the Bel Air stage, for your opponent to completely misjudge a turn and slam into one of the many light poles that run down the middle of the long, sweeping back section. In fact, you can almost count on this happening, even when going up against your arch-nemesis--the ludicrously named Matt Peacock. You'd expect the final boss in an arcade racing game to be an absolute fiend on the road, especially after his skills have been touted for the entirety of the game. Instead, Peacock displays the same kind of skill behind the wheel as another notorious L.A. celebrity: Lindsay Lohan.

Each of the four stages you progress through in career mode features several stages inspired by various sections of Los Angeles, including downtown, the San Diego Freeway, Palos Verdes Drive, and Bel Air. Yes, in LASR, Bel Air is apparently one of the hotbeds of the hardcore street racing scene. Proving the developers have never stepped foot in Los Angeles--or at least they didn't have the time to fully flesh out the environments--there is no foot or street traffic to contend with in the game. Sure, there are cars parked on the side of the road periodically, but no traffic beyond you and your opponent. And while the environments don't look bad, and some of the tracks feature nice designs, the nighttime setting tends to become monotonous after a while. Would it have killed them to include a sunlit, high-speed jaunt down Highway 1? Car models are generally OK; if a bit on the generic side, though the in-car view features some laughably bad rear-view and side mirrors that reflect what appears to be a single texture, rendering them effectively useless.

Though the game features exhibition, time trials, and online multiplayer racing for up to eight drivers, you'll find most of the limited fun offered by LASR in its single-player experience. Curiously, we weren't able to actually enter any of the time trial events--the game claimed that every car we had required more upgrading. Then, once we finished the single-player game, we tried again, but LASR informed us that we had already completed all the time trials available. Other strange bugs we found in the game were the periodic inability to quit out of online races, as well as opponent cars that simply stopped after a crash and refused to start racing again.

The bottom line is that LASR looks and plays too much like a budget game for its own good. Thanks to a decent driving model, you can overlook the game's unsophisticated take on the City of Angels. However, when coupled with its lazy design and a number of poorly implemented features, LASR's problems glare like high beams in your rear-view mirror.

* Driving model feels good
* fine sense of speed.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium III 1.2 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1200 MB
Other: Windows 2000/XP

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 5 2.4 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB

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