NASCAR 08

"Terribly Unfun In Almost Every Way"

First off this is not a simulation. Go talk to Dale Jr. or Carl Edwards and ask them if they got to where they were by winning licenses in a Richard Petty Experience Car? Cause that's most of career mode.

Graphics: This is the best part of the game, I actually enjoyed the fact that the put a decent looking pit crew in the game and the pit crew moves around like a real crew does. The tracks look great and so do the cars.

Sound: Decent, I didn't really like the music in the game but it doesn't really matter since you have custom soundtracks.

Gameplay: Here's where we get the problems the tuning options are great there's plenty of them! Unfortuately if you don't know anything about cars, better yet setting up racing stock cars, YOUR SCREWED! The default setups are almost painful to play. For some reason EA decided to base the whole career mode on tutorials and not have a tutorial for this.
The bump drafting is broken as well, as a matter of fact the entire crashing/hitting other cars is broken. If you even lightly tap another car YOU will usually spin out and crash, heck if you SMASH into another car 80% of the time they will keep going (At the same speed) and you will simply crash. Bump drafting is a key part of NASCAR, espicially on superspeedways but when you hit it usually just make a screeching sound and lots of damage, even when going pretty much the same speed.

Online is the only thing that's fun to play. This would be great if it wasn't the ONLY thing! Really if your looking for single player, look some where far from this. It's hard to review this game because there's almost nothing there. So I'll review what isn't in it. There's no career mode, there's a season mode. There no driver creation only choose your manufacturer and a choice of 4 paint schemes! THATS RIGHT 4! Compare this game to Forza! You have no control over your number. You can create a car and choose from number 100 to 199 and choose from 3 available fonts, the paint choices are slightly better but there's no sponsor choices. There's no more "Lightening Challenges" . No pre-race activity. There's a great re-play system. No 2-4 player offline.There's the Toyota racing challenges which is basically the same tutorials from career mode.

This is basically the game. Test set-ups in practice or in the test and tune mode and then use them. This would be great but since there is no decent career mode (you can't pick set-ups for the tutorials), what's the point? If EA asked me if I'd want a decent looking game in exchange for a butchered career mode. How could EA expect this to be considered good? Gears of War looked great but it has a great story mode, Halo, GTA and others are great because of their story/career mode not graphics. heck even previous NASCAR games were better because of the career mode. That's all I have to say.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/07