Thomas McDermott // Monday, July 18th, 2005
// Printable version 
Street Racing Syndicate review
How many urban street racers is too many? Surely a new racer by Namco is just the ticket?
You can blame The Fast and the Furious for all this, ever since it was first released way back in 2001 there has been a never-ending slew of tuner racers hitting the market. Each one of them hugely varying in quality with the likes of the Burnout and Midnight Club series been the best the market has to offer and the others closing following behind.
Now before we get any further into this review let’s get one thing straight Street Racing Syndicate (SRS) does not share the same tarmac as the likes of Burnout 3 or Midnight Club 3 but the real question is how far does it fall behind?
Green Light
For SRS Namco has decided to go down a realistic/simulation route. SRS is home to over 50 authentically model cars from real life manufactures, including models from Nissan, Mitsubishi and Mazda and a whole host of other manufactures which are far to numerous to mention. Like most other racers the objective is to drive to get some cash which will get you more cars.
If you race enough events and win enough money you will be driving a varying selection of different cars. Provided you have the funds, you'll be ripping through traffic in the Mazda RX-7 and the RX-8; the Toyota Supra MR2 Spyder, Celica, Corolla (AE86); the Subaru WRX, WRX STi; the Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34), 350Z; the Lexus IS 300 and the Mitsubishi Evo VIII plus a whole host of others.
Just like a majority of tuner racers released in recent years SRS allows you to tinker with your chosen car to your heart's content. Suspension, brakes, turbos, nitrous, spoilers, tires, paint jobs and decals can all be messed with till your happy with you creation. But the question is do the alterations have an affect on your car. The simple answer is that it is too hard to find out.
In fact you will probably have to race two or three events untill you can really find out if your alterations are having a positive or negative effect and you don’t need me to tell you that that is not a lot of fun. SRS offers an excellent selection of cars and a multitude of ways to thinker with them but the bad news is the rest of the game is downhill from there.
Red Light
Three different game modes are available in SRS. These modes are Street Mode which is a career mode then there is Arcade Mode and Multiplayer which are all self explanatory. SRS divides 72 races between LA, Philadelphia and Miami each with day and night tracks which gladly offer a slight bit of variety to the game. Each of the events you race in offers a different set of rewards.
Some will earn you respect points, which are great of unlocking the extras the game offers you, others will offer you cash which as you probably know are good for buying things, or in SRS cars and parts. You can also make side bets with the other racers in an attempt to make a little extra money. You also have the ability to challenge other drivers that have "race me" written above them to obtain extra rewards. Lastly SRS lets you try to outrun the police.
I personally love this feature in any game as it is always fun and SRS adds the extra incentive off dishing out a rather harsh fine if you fail to escape. Oh and finally one last thing. In SRS you can win women, yes win women. If you race well you can unlock a video (there are 52 of them available) of a girl and she dances for you. Now in my opinion there is nothing wrong with watching beautiful women dance but as BMX XXX proved a few years ago are video game really a good place to offer such rewards? To each his own I guess.
Now all of the above may sound excellent and in my opinion SRS would be a fantastic addition to the racing genre if two critical components were fixed. First of the game feels extremely slow, even if the game tells you that you are hitting 200mph you will still feel you are just driving around the car park of you local Tesco. The second critical flaw is that the driving is an absolute pain, yes it is realistic but been realistic is far from been fun. SRS give you no sense of speed, no sense that you have defied death after hurtling around a 90 degree corner and overall is not very entertaining as a result.
Finish Line
SRS is home to some nice ideas that could have worked very well if implemented better, but sadly the time was not taken to ensure their quality and thus the game suffers greatly. Couple this with the inferior driving while compared with other games in the genre and you sadly get a rather average racing title. Maybe it would be better to pick up Burnout Revenge in a couple of months time.
Channels
-- Richard Hammond
Of course single player get bored pretty fast, but then you can race online against other players, and test your skills (i have been on 49 place in 1000 ranking online) - thats the real fun and i haven't seen any cheats like in NFSU.
There are still cons you haven't mention:
- almost non-existing visual tuning, there is only one bodykit for a car, thats too little IMO
- small selection of cars, few models of one car, no hondas (although its honda choice, they didn't liked damage and cops)
- crappy support for racing wheels (in PC version), overall no Namco support on PC :(
- domination of one car - Nissan Skyline GT-R (BNR 34), if someone choose Skyline online, others don't have choice but to take Skyline also - that tells everything.... but there is one exception, you can win with Lancer EVO VIII on mountain track, but only there i think, still i have beaten people using EVO's with my Skyline on that track
Overall i give SRS 8/10 in my scale, great graphic (cars look better then in NFSU2 and i have a lot more fps in SRS), catchy tunes, great and almost realistic driving model and sense of speed (for true realistic get GTR or Richard Burns Rally), good multiplayer.
PS. Sorry for my harsh introduction but i was realy pissed of with all these under-rating reviews about SRS.
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