For the past decade or so, the Need for Speed series has been all about illegal street racing, but Need for Speed: ProStreet completely sells out this most tantalizing aspect for some cheap (or, rather, extremely expensive) product placement. Fortunately, the racing aspect of the game is decent enough to merit this new installment and the new focus on race days provides a shift in venue from the classic open road style of environment in past iterations.

Smoking Wheel Wells

Need for Speed: ProStreet takes professional/illegal street racing and re-imagines the entire event as a modern racing tournament, similar in many ways to the style of competition seen in the SSX franchise. Rather than tool around town looking for races, the game is divided up into race days that collect a handful (typically four to seven races) of individual races into one main event. The result is that you basically accept races in packs, because once you enter a race day, you're in it until you win enough of the races or quit.

One of the things the race days enable ProStreet to do is factor in persistent damage to your car over the course of the race day. This makes keeping your ride clean and shiny much more desirable, so fans of the old-school style of Need for Speed racing (where you bash your car sideways into tight hairpins that you'd have to slow to a near-halt for anyway) may find themselves displeased with the new focus on vehicle maintenance.


At the same time, while performance is somewhat based on how much you've banged up your car, you won't notice much loss of performance unless you seriously brutalize your vehicle and refuse to repair it over the course of several races. The system is strict enough to reward careful drivers, but forgiving enough that it didn't crimp our style too much (except that all of our carefully pimped out autos looked like so many balls of wadded up aluminum foil by the end of any given race day). While damage doesn't impact performance as much as we had worried that it might - to the point that, early in our career, we'd meticulously repair our vehicles after each race - the look of the damage was simply awesome, especially when we'd watch our hood float into the stratosphere after a particularly tooth-rattling collision.