Well, I am an old-school NFS fan, I played them from the first one, right down to the point when I started losing interest, somewhere around the release of Carbon, So I take it that I am the perfect candidate for one of these promised smiles and to be honest, I am more than happy to have my mind changed.... Watching Maggie Q standing in a strangely dark lit room saying something like "Ok, your getting in deeper and that's exactly where I want you" (I can't tell if that is supposed to sound that bad) over the span of what must be around 5 - 10 seconds does not exactly make me want to break out the popcorn just yet. We can't expect too much of a story from a racing game but this time it looked like we were going to get given one, which is the only reason why it's quite a letdown so far.... It seems as if they have tried to squeeze every single next-gen visual effect onto the screen at the same time, ultimately making it so overdone that you basically can't see what is going on. image: IGN All the races take place during sunset or sundown (and there is no excuse for not yet integrating day/night cycles into the series yet) , so you have the sun in your face a lot of the time.... The roads are strangely reflective, as if they are constantly wet (but even more shiny than usual) and the cars themselves are also overly shiny and reflective, essentially making everything look so full of white reflection marks that it just looks plain ugly and the glow effects on everything can be such a visual distraction that you will end up slamming into a pillar at full speed just because it was too difficult to see what's in front of you.... Most of the time it will be relatively fine but it can drop like a brick through certain areas and is so inconsistent that it will pick up when you face your car away from the city towards the open seas, causing times where the framerate could drop down to around 5 - 8 framers per second and then jump straight up to 60fps as you turn a corner.... While I never really thought about them much in previous games, the sound guys have done such a fantastic job in keeping the dialogue realistic that I started to wonder if they had just plain stolen it off of some Real TV episodes.... The customisation has been cut down, which I don't really see as a bad thing to be honest and to make things even more laughable (especially when compared to other titles on the market), elements like simple vinyls don't even show up in online Multiplayer races.... While I can understand that yes, maybe there are some people out there who are short on time and would rather pay to get ahead, It is not in the spirit of gaming and comes across more as a willingness to make extra profits in every way possible and with no shame.... image: IGN Take that great driving mechanic and destroy it's fun factor with low framerates, repetitive races, lack of motivation from the story and an almost useless open world and you are really left with nothing but a game that feels like it has only moved backwards. At the end of the day the game feels like a stripped down and emptied out version of some of the past titles and while that may be fine for handheld titles, it really is unacceptable for a Next-Gen title from a large company such as EA.... Those were the good old days of the Need for Speed franchise and while I really did enjoy the move to street racing with the Underground series and even Most Wanted, I think that it should have ended there. Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted, Carbon and Undercover feel like they are still the same game at their core and while I commend EA on trying something different with Pro Street, it isn't the kind of "different" that many of the fans are looking for.... I really cannot recommend this game to anyone looking for a fun racer to play on their console because in all truth, I would rather recommend picking up a cheap copy of NFS: Most Wanted instead, purely because it feels like it is a more advanced game.... Scoring: Gameplay: 6/10 Presentation: 4/10 Sound: 8.5/10 Value: 6/10 Overall: 6/1 0 [ Nothing more than a reminder that the Need for Speed series is in need of a serious change.