Juiced Preview

For nearly one year Electronic Arts had the luxury of being the only developer/publisher on the market with a game like Need For Speed Underground.  That’s about to change when Juiced speeds onto Xbox this September.

The cars, the graphics, the thrills – where do I begin?  Do I start by telling you how awesome it is to race an automatically modified vehicle?  Do I tell you how incredibly realistic the city environments are?  Or do I go into detail about the turbo boost and how it turns a fast car into a lightning-quick speeding machine?

I don’t know a gamer who hasn’t played Need For Speed Underground before, so you don’t need me to tell you what nitrous oxide can do for a motor vehicle.  Press the boost button and the screen blurs, slightly stretching, pushing the car forward at an accelerated rate.  The graphic effect here is really cool – very much like The Fast and the Furious.

Juiced is a lot more polished than the majority of the racers on the market.  Effective graphic effects (shadows, lighting, reflections, etc.) should either standout like a rainbow on a rainy day or a stay hidden until closely examined.  The effects that you always notice but don’t really care about – those are the worst ones, and you won’t find any of them in Juiced.

Reflections are used in a very subtle way.  Chances are you won’t even notice all the ways they’re used until you watch a replay of your race.  Your environments move by so fast that it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to check out all the intricacies of the buildings and how the light attaches to them.  The sun shines, bends and moves to correspond with your vehicle’s position.  Shadows are noticeably bigger during specific times of day, and nonexistent at times when they shouldn’t be there.  The rain effect is slightly disappointing, but I might feel that way if I hadn’t played the best-looking racing game on the planet: Rallisport Challenge 2.

Only one mode was accessible in the demo, but several will be available in the final game.  The standard modes include Custom Race, Career, Arcade, Online, Videos and Replays.  Within Custom Race you’ll find:

• Hot Hatch
• Mid-Size Sports
• Classics
• Import Coupe
• All-Wheel Drive
• Japanese Super Car
• Muscle Cars
• Prototype Mods

And if that’s not enough for you, selecting one of those gameplay types will open more even options: Race, Sprint, Showoff and Solo.  Import Coupe was the only one that could be played, and you couldn’t do anything in that mode except race.

Once the race begins you’ll have a hard time concentrating on the “extra” game modes.  Juiced will have you focused entirely on the race.  Your mind won’t wander, but should you lose any amount of concentration, Juiced will reward your lack of commitment with a nice big crash.

These cars are tricked out and fully equipped to speed, but as a result they are a lot less responsive to turns.  This may not be the case in the final game, but it was the case with the Supra, the Celica GT, and the Celica WTTL1.  It’s cruising time during those long stretches of road, but when a turn comes up you had better be prepared to shift gears and slow down.  The demo did not all you to total your vehicle and I doubt such an option will be included in the final version.  You can, however, kill your speed, destroy your steering, damage your ability to accelerate, etc.  Worst of all, the nitrous boost is the first thing to go after a crash!  How can you pretend to be a pimp-riding master of the streets if you can’t get a boost from your juice?

Juiced gives players the chance to modify their vehicles in the coolest of ways, but once again the demo wouldn’t let me check them out.  Am I cursed?  Or do they just want to keep all the good stuff a secret?

Luckily I could change the color of my vehicle, and on the bottom of the screen it said “auto-mod” next to a picture of the Y button.  Press it once to customize your ride automatically.  Don’t like what you see?  Press it again to get another auto-mod.  You can do this several times in the demo, and should be able to do it even more in the final version.  It’d be awesome if you could make individual modifications after selecting an auto-mod.  Hopefully that’s something the developers already thought of.

No matter what this game is going to rock.  We know that for certain.  Will it be better than Need For Speed Underground?  All of the pieces are there; it’s just a matter of how well they’re put together before the puzzle is complete.  Based on Acclaim’s track record with the Burnout series, it’s likely that Juiced will turn out to be one of the best racing games of the season.