Need for Speed: High Stakes

"The title says Need For Speed... so why does the game move at a crawl?"

I loved last year's Need For Speed 3, so imagine my joy when I finally got to rent Need For Speed 4... and imagine my disgust when I saw what EA had done. Looks like the Need For Speed curse has returned.

First off, the basics. The Need For Speed franchise is all about racing exotic cars that in real life cost nearly as much as the President's annual salary (or close to it) on various roadways, and this one isn't any exception. Hot Pursuit mode is back in action, and this year's model has the added attraction of High Stakes mode, in which two players can compete to win each other's heavily modified vehicles, thus damaging their friendship forever, or at least until a new Pokemon game comes out. New cars are also included along with some of the other series standbys. Sounds good, doesn't it?

It's not. This game falls on its face in the all-important areas of control and graphics.

The control is appallingly loose compared with NFS 3's tight handling. I kept hitting walls and going off the road, even when I knew I shouldn't be, and pulling off the all-important power slide was virtually impossible, since countersteering tends to cause accidents unless you have a feather touch on the D-pad or stick.

The control isn't helped by the lackluster frame-rate, either. I believe 3 moves at the relatively smooth speed of 25-30 frames per second, but this game is lucky if it can run at 20 fps, and the slowdown makes it impossible to enjoy. If more than two cars are on screen, expect the game to slow down drastically. In fact, in Hot Pursuit mode, the game actually slowed down to a mere ten fps (what is this, NFS or the 3DO Doom?) by actual count while I was racing through a town on one course.

Even the texture maps are ugly; they look like they belong in a first-gen PSX game, and certainly not in a game as late in the system's lifecycle as this one. I could live with that, except all the colors seemed to have been washed out and replaced with faint, grainy versions of themselves. I could even live with that, although I wouldn't be happy, except for that slowdown and the poor control. Taken together, they destroy the entire experience for me.

Every other game in this series seems to fall off in quality from the previous entry, and just as NFS 2 was a gigantic letdown, so High Stakes (the game isn't actually numbered) is a gigantic fall-off in quality from the fantastic NFS 3. There are those who love the game, but my advice is to buy NFS 3 (newly reissued in the Greatest Hits line), Gran Turismo, or Ridge Racer Type 4 instead. Any one of these games will provide you with hours of pure racing enjoyment. If you already own these games, you'll probably have to wait for the next NFS or Gran Turismo 2. Whatever you do, save your money and avoid this disc like the plague.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99