Each need for speed game I play I get more and more confused. What is this series trying to do? After the arcade street racing of most wanted and the poorly controlling but similar carbon, we have the more simulation focused pro street. It makes it quite difficult to know what to expect when we are jumping between arcade and simulation racing. Pro street goes down the sim route with a side helping of boy racer style illegal street racing and racing meetups. Fans of tuning and playing around with the car should enjoy the customisation options of this released and the atmosphere of the street racing is fun if a bit cringeworthy like previous NFS titles. Racing takes part on race meet weekends, letting you attempt racing and drag racing events against AI opponents. The racing feels fine. It is more sim based, so there is less room for mistakes and offers a bit more challenge. The drag races are not much fun to be honest, and basically boil down to some awkward button presses. I just found myself not massively enjoying the game. The racetracks were boring and I didn't feel a lot of excitement from head to head racing with the AI. The format of the campaign is very repetative, with each race weekend having too many very similar style races or drag races. It's not a bad package and I can see it would be appealing for some groups, it's just not really for me.

When ProStreet first came out, I was so disappointed with its deviation from the Underground formula that I quickly abandoned it, thinking it's become some sort of a hardcore simulator. However, upon revisiting it now, I feel like it's not even that good as a simulator.

The core gameplay mechanics function well. I'd even say ProStreet might have had the best handling in the series upon release. But NFS games have never really been known for their handling, and here it's still not Gran Turismo or Colin McRae Rally levels good. It's competent enough to make the gameplay fun, but it's not the star of the show like in those games. After you get used to it, you kinda just forget it. I would like to point out the fact that there's no rubber-banding, but tbf rubber-banding in a game like this would've absolutely ruined it, so it's almost a given that it's not here. The damage model is also pretty sick, but again, it's more of a bonus thing than something that would keep you playing.

By placing you in a realistic legal-racing enivronment, Black Box kinda shot themselves in a foot. Because it means no shortcuts, no traffic, no police chases and no replenishable nitro. While that makes perfect sense for the setting, it does reduce gameplay complexity, which in other racing simulators is usually achieved through the subtle improvement of gameplay mechanics (which, again, here are not on the sufficient enough level).

Instead the complexity here comes mostly from the customization and tuning. And I think this is probably what makes or breaks the game for most people. Personally, I think this whole aspect of the game is done much worse here than in the previous entries. The menus are less convenient. The tuning is not really explained to you and has way too many parameters that you wouldn't be able to figure out unless you're a carhead. And what absolutely kills it for me is how every car should be assigned to one racing mode, and each of those cars has its own unique car parts (even if it's THE SAME MODEL!). In other words, you could buy yourself a Subaru Impreza, splurge on the most expensive engine thus becoming unbeatable in grip races, but then you have to buy a new Impreza just to be able to use it in drag mode, and then buy that same engine again. This is just plain extortion that needlessly pads out the game, which btw already has a much slower progression than its predecessors.

Speaking of racing modes, I am very glad to see the return of drag racing, but here it's so mutilated. The whole thing is basically a mini-game preceded by another mini-game. You don't even look at the road while racing, because they made it's so hard to get the perfect timing, that you end up just looking at the tachometer. Not like you'd need to look at the road anyway, since now there's only one lane and no traffic, so it's not like you could crash into anything. Kinda the whole point of drag races used to be the adrenaline of driving super-fast in a straight line, constantly on the verge of crashing. Here they're just pointless. And in most cases, if you fuck up with the first gear-shift, it's basically over for you.

Regarding the presentation, which had been excellent between HP2 and Carbon, here it's just bland and boring. The aesthetics are "realistic", but they didn't have to make the colors so drab. The environments actually look pretty decent otherwise. And the soundtrack is probably my least favorite since Porsche Unleashed. It's not bad, but I can't remember a single song except for Wiley's Bow E3, but that's only because it's one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums. The rest of the soundtrack just kinda blends with the background.

There's seemingly no story this time around (or at least it's pretty scarce), but there is an annoying commentator, that seems to always only comment about you, like other racers don't exist. And the short cutscenes before every race (you know, where you just see cars pulling up) are for some reason unskippable, even though IIRC they're skippable in every other NFS game.

This feels like a game with a lot of potential that was ruined by the slow progression and the absolutely abominable extortionist game economy.