If you haven't played NFS:Underground, this is a cheap knock-off

Street Racing Syndicate (SRS) is the type of game that could possibly appeal to the 12-14 year old male who has dreams of one day becoming an "underground" racer himself, or the 40+ year old male who wishes he could only be a part of the street racing scene. Other than that, I cannot fathom another single person who might enjoy this game. If SRS was the only street-racing game on the market, it possibly could be successful, but with NFS: Underground out long ago, SRS plays the part of the crappy second choice. From the very first movie intro of the game on forward, SRS feels like a very low budget game that tries to cash in on the "street racing" fad, while sacrificing quality and fun gameplay in the process.

GAMEPLAY

When it comes to SRS, all of it's troubles begin and end with the gameplay. In any game, a lot of fun bells and whistles can keep a person entertained for awhile, but if the core gameplay (in this case, racing) sucks, they lose interest very quickly. Simply put, if you were to rent ANY other PS2 racing game, I highly doubt SRS would be better than it in the actual driving part of the game. The handling is poor at best. The analog stick steering does not feel fluid at all, it is very jerky and unresponsive. The control scheme is pretty basic, X is gas, Square is brake, Circle handbrake, Triangle switch views, R1 is nitrous, R2/L2 shifting, and L1 look back. This did the trick, but I wanted to change my nitrous(R1) and view change(Triangle) buttons around. However, the menu only had an option of 3 other "preset" control schemes, none of which helped.

In my opinion, one of the most crucial aspects of a racing game is the control of acceleration and braking. In SRS, this is one area that needs a lot of improvement. Again, any normal car will accelerate smoothly, where the cars in SRS are very jerky on the throttle, and hard to brake consistently. If any of you have played GT3, SRS is a nightmare in comparison. For some random reason, the "rubberband effect"(slower cars catching up to the leader) in SRS is the single-worst I have seen in any racing game I've played. I had one race with my 450hp Lancer Evo where I was caught on the final straight by a 200hp Celica, who blew right by me like I was standing still. Seriously.

Perhaps if the actual racing would have been more fun, I would have taken more interest in some of the other parts of the game, such as customizing and upgrading your car. However, everything had a very repetitive feel and I lost interest quickly, because I didn't see the point in upgrading a car that I didn't even have fun driving around.

FEATURES

If there is any one area where SRS might possibly be enjoyable, it is in the features department. However, even some of the more enjoyable features, such as upgrading your cars performance and looks, have glitches that suck the fun right out of the game. I am into the import scene a little bit, and so the list of parts and manufacturers was impressive. However, just about everything you could do to your car looks-wise came across as tacky and lame, most graphics consisted of some form of ugly striping, flames, Japanese lettering, or random Anime females dressed in bikinis. GT3 had a better selection of rims. And changing any parts or features on your car takes 2-3 seconds to load the change, which makes it feel like forever if you want to scroll through a list to find something you want.

Most of the racing is pretty basic stuff, I found no cool types of races or challenges that made me think, "Wow, I've never seen that before". While there is a free-roaming aspect which let's you traverse the entire city, it is very bland and uninteresting compared to some of the unique and cool locales found in games like GTA. The only thing I found remotely entertaining was the whole aspect of picking up "girlfriends", but that was because it was so campy and over-the-top funny, even though it wasn't meant to be. Basically you just complete some challenge (checkpoints, time trial, etc), and doing so adds a "girlfriend" to your collection, complete with home videos of them. Apparently, these are "Authentic girls from the import racing scene", but you'd swear Namco raided the local strip joint, and had the girls dance around on a soundstage while switching outfits from the requisite bikinis to lingerie.


GRAPHICS/SOUND

Considering you can pick up GT3 for $20(here in Canada), SRS looks like an original Playstation game in comparison. The graphics were terribly grainy, even the video clips were not good at all. There was no widescreen 16x9 option the the video menu, only a choice of centering the screen on your TV, which I found disappointing since I own a Toshiba widescreen. I've read a couple of reviews of the X-Box version where other reviewers said the game was very smooth, but speaking only for the PS2 version, I noticed some very bad framerate drop on numerous occasions. In-game dialogue consisted of only two different male and female voices for every single person you come across. The soundtrack was a who's-who of lame hip-hop/rap artists, singing the requisite "underground, street racing, chicks" type of songs, and again, the repetitive grinding of the same 8-10 songs just grated on me after awhile.

CONCLUSION

Altogether, SRS felt like either a rushed project that was slapdashed together to get it out on the market to capitilize on the popularity of street racing, or a very low budget exercise in ripping off a good idea from something else. Looking at the slick packaging, and the somewhat-cool list of features, I can see a lot of people getting sucked into buying this game, but even though I only spent the $5 to rent this game, I still feel like I wasted my money. Poor execution, no fun-factor, lame graphics, SRS has every base covered on the "Worst Game of the Year" award.

GAMEPLAY:3/10
FEATURES:6/10
GRAPHICS/SOUND: 1.5/10

OVERALL SCORE: 2.5/10