EA’s Need For Speed franchise once again does the multiplatform dance on all the major consoles old and new.

Adding a smattering of new race modes, tons of customization options, and lots of thematic style, EA hopes to cash in on the racing desires of gamers everywhere.

So how does it hold up?

Let’s find out, using the PS3 version of the game.

Details after the jump ...

Playing through the story mode is necessary to unlock almost everything. Main problem: The game is so overstuffed with MTV-style “cool street racing stuff” that the actual gameplay, which isn’t bad, suffers as it seems to “reward” you with overdone doses of crap.

The customization features of the game are actually pretty cool. With several dozen major cars and manufacturers from the world of autosports in the game and tons of major and minor visual changes to make, there’s a lot of options to make a truly unique vehicle. In addition to paint options (with different kinds of paint, even) and performance upgrades, you can add tons of decals and aftermarket parts that can be further customized by raising, widening, and generally deforming parts into a truly unique ride.

This is all supposedly in preparation for online multiplayer. The issue I had with MP is that not only are there few people online (with so few systems out at the moment, it’s no wonder), but lag makes itself very prevalent, which is a big deal considering the speed that this game tends to operate at.

Also, there’s little opportunity for gamers with serious driving skill to do really well against players with better cars. You can pick from some of the default multiplayer vehicles, or maybe restrict the cars to specific tiers (better cars are in higher tiers), but it’s pretty clear that after a while, everyone chooses the best car in their class of vehicles. For a game that relies so heavily on customization, there sure are a lot of similar looking cars around.<

Further, EA controls all the game servers (or so I am led to believe) and on the box directly states that it reserves the right to end online support with a mere 30 days' notice. Given the recent abandonment of older titles in other sports franchises, expect to see support for this game disappear in a year or two after more titles in the franchise are released for PS3.

Visually, the game looks pretty nice with convincing cityscapes and great lighting effects. To keep game actors from appearing too out of place, EA took the rather novel idea of placing the normal video of the actors over polygon model drivers in the cars. More often than not, the effect is actually pretty nice but on a few occasions I couldn’t help but think that the character looked a bit “skewed.” Certainly, it is better than the terrible live action on green screen bits scattered around the game. Those segments look really tacky and I frankly can’t believe that they were used a second time (after appearing in NFS Most Wanted last year). Next-gen consoles and the PC incorporate the extra processing power at their disposal to throw more vehicles onto the track in some areas,

If there’s a single problem with the way this game works, it’s the repetitiveness. Sure, some of the race modes (most notably Canyon Duels and free-roam challenge races) are somewhat novel and pretty fun, but others (like the annoyingly easy checkpoint races, or the pain-in-the-butt drifting courses) just feel bland and serve to break up the game into moments of great fun and depressing boredom. Unfortunately, many of the best races are few and far between in career mode, leaving players almost grinding their way to new vehicles and parts, like some sort of half-baked automotive RPG.

This certainly isn’t a terrible game, but with lots of annoying segments and some average racer gameplay I can’t really recommend it unless you are really desperate for a semi-realistic racing game on the PS3. By the time this drops in price to a budget title, expect to see better racers like Motorstorm available for you to spend your hard-earned cash on.

Pros:
- Lots of customization which can be proudly shown off in multiplayer matches;
-Pretty visuals and a great sense of speed;
-New race modes like Canyon Duel and Pursuit are fun to play.

Cons
-Terrible, overdone story mars career mode;
-Online play suffers from lag and lack of players;
-Older, more traditional race modes feel ho-hum;
-EA can abandon multiplayer support as soon as it wants to hype its next release;
-PS3 version does not appear to incorporate Collector’s Edition material.