NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup

"EA Sports continues to dissapoint"

After owning every NASCAR game since 98' on the Play station not one console NASCAR game took my heart until Dirt to Daytona with is wonderful physics and 4 classes of race cars. After the slow improvements EA made from the retched NASCAR Thunder 2002 I was excited for a new game featuring modifieds, Craftman trucks, Busch series, and the Nextel cup series. For once I believe EA had a clue as to what they were doing. Being excited and overjoyed I put this game in only to learn that it was a COMPLETE step BACKWARDS than the year before it. The only nice new feature was fight to the top and even that was horrible. There was no more starting with a junkie car and trying to build your team up from there up grading, fabricating and all that nice stuff. I ended up playing skeet with this game when I was done because I was so mad. You can't even change your settings after each year in your career!

Game play 2/10
The game play in this is also another step backwards. The cars act like cement walls when you hit them and you literally have to go backwards just to make them move. The racing is tight and somewhat enjoyable but all the cars seem to always be bunched up. The drafting is well up to date and working fine but the ally/rival feature is still messed up. After running a few laps at bristol I had an AI driver run into me while I was holding my line, completely his fault and he got incredibaly mad at me and kept banging on my car trying to take me out of the race. I don't even want to get started on how much beating and slamming and smashing you have to do just to put a measly dent in a car, needless to say wreck it out of the race.
Sad.

Graphics 4/10
The graphics are really glitchy in 2005. Watching caution replays a car will hit the wall extremely hard and sustain damage yet it will not show it. To see it the car must be within "10" feet of yours. It is ludicrous. The damage models haven't been improved since 2003 and even that wasn't much of a change. Once again completely disappointing. The thing that got me the most crazy was the fact that there were billions and billions of cars in the game that were more than 2 digits. It is not very realistic passing 20 Busch, Nextel, Featherlite, and trucks in a row with numbers like "135" without seeing a 2 digit car number. That took 3 graphic points off right there alone. Oh, and WHERE IS THE REPLAYS?

Sound 5/10
Ok, I am sick of hearing my annoying crew chief talk. It is really repetitive and really annoying. Why can't they get an announcer or something for the game? It would make it more fun to listen to instead of, "You ticked off something fierce" Bah. The car sounds are quite decent though and there isn't much to complain about there. They do have a lot of room for improvement though.

Overall 3/10
Since EA Sports, ::cough:: extremely arcady sports, has taken over the rights to NASCAR they should make a NASCAR game or give this game to us for free because it is almost robbery with no improvements. They are making more money than they deserve working on the next years game for 2 weeks before it goes gold. Stay away and pray, just pray that next years game will be better.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/30/05