Well, another week passes and another racing game drops onto the desk at Gamecell, this time the long-delayed Juiced, attempting to steal the street racing genre from the front-runners Need For Speed Underground 2 & Midnight Club 3.
Juiced feels a lot more like Burnout than the current strain of GT4s and Forzas- The cars featured are mainly the ones you’d see in the film The Fast and the Furious, ranging from Golfs through RX-7s right up to Dodge Vipers and Chargers. You can tinker about with all aspects of the car’s appearance and handling; lowering suspension, adding flames or two-tone paint, as well as nitrous or experimental parts. Then, when you’re out on the grid it’s much more hectic than the standard racing fare, with some pretty nice touches, such as the almost-liquid blurring effects when you go full-throttle with the nitrous oxide.
For the graphics whores around there isn’t really much to whet your appetite here I’m afraid. The game was delayed quite a while, and you can see the consequences when you compare it to just about any racing game released recently, and I'm not just talking about the sublime GT4 either - regardless of how flashy the screenshots look in-game Juiced looks dated. The nitrous effect does look really good, but when too many cars are on-screen at once, Juiced likes to go into slow-mo, which I’d like to say was intentional, but it’s just not true.
Juiced works on a street-racing gang model: There are various gangs around the area, all represented by different people, who also have different racing needs (representing the different types of racing available). By racing the other gangs you accumulate respect, allowing you to join their races or race for pink slips (ownership of their car) with them, but also cash in through the race prize money and any bets you made on the side.
Money and betting plays a large part in this game, and the thrill of knowing you might lose your best car if you don’t win this race certainly does make Juiced a more tense game than most. It is quite brutal here, as it comes with an auto-save feature, meaning you can’t just quit without saving and try the race again- after your money’s gone, it’s gone. Try to turn the PS2 off in a pink slip race and you’ll lose your car automatically too! This lack of forgiveness is good because it makes the races more intense, knowing you can’t simply retry if you lose – but this can end up feeling a bit like a game of snakes and ladders....
This is, however, where one of the game’s biggest problems set in. By not having a more forgiving gambling system you can sink into a spiral of losses, ending up with not even enough money to fix your car, or enter races. Granted, if you can’t someone turns up and fixes it for you, but after losing all your money it’s very hard to get back up to the top again, and you can fall back just as quickly. So yes, that’s what gambling is really like, but if I was playing a casino-sim I wouldn’t like to play the “now-you-have-to-sleep-in-a-
dumpster-because-you-spent-your-rent-on-the-roulette-table” sequences either, thank you…
The racing however is pretty sound. You’ve got quite a restricted list of cars to choose from at the beginning, which opens out to a nice collection of over 50 real, licensed and well-modelled rides. They all handle quite differently, especially when you start to tinker with them. They all have a feeling of weight to them, but the rear-wheel drive cars are quite unpredictable and it takes a lot more effort to keep them from spinning off the track. Since the game was re-jigged the handling has been fiddled with and they tried to make it more 'believable' – unfortunately this just seems to manifest itself with a high level of unpredictability. Juiced has tried to make the racing fairer by adding classes in order of horsepower. This does stop you from running a Viper against a Golf, but if you soup your car up to the BHP limit (199/299 etc) you will always beat the AI, as their cars are rarely faster than yours, and they are a bit slow off the mark anyway.
Unfortunately you get stung with the AI problem when you have to enter Team races. These are point-to-point or circuit races but with teams of either two or three racing against each other. The winner is the team whose cars all cross the line first. I thought the AI opponents were the slowest things on four wheels until you meet your “crew”…They drive even more slowly than the AI in GT4’s “B-Spec mode”, and you dish out pretty much the same commands to them (‘low, medium and high’ effort I think..). It’s unfortunate that the winner is the first to have all the cars across the line rather than an aggregate team score, because it doesn’t matter how well you do, you’ll always lose because while you finished 1st your AI buddy is still trotting around in last place.
As mentioned earlier, each different racing gang caters for a different type of race, and there are quite a few. As well as (solo/team) circuit and point-to-point racing there is also drag racing. This is a short race which makes you run on manual gears and is a pretty easy way to make money if you’ve got the highest-spec car. There’s also a show-off mode. This involves pulling off some stunts like donuts and 180s in order to earn respect, but tires pretty damn quickly, and feels like yet another tacked-on gimmick to the game in order to pad things out.
Online Juiced could have been a winner, but after a few laggy races with cars skipping around (this seemed to get particularly bad when we managed to get six in a race) and a lack of the voice communications that the Xbox game is blessed with, I lost interest remarkably quickly.
Juiced feels like a fairly average game masked by a wealth of street references and lots of stuck-on game modes to hide the flaws in the AI and main career mode. The career mode revolves around this need to gain respect to race with more crews, and host races on their turf. Unfortunately, after you’ve gotten that far, there’s nothing more to do. Rewards aren’t given for doing any particular tasks or completing a certain percentage of the game so after a while the desire to keep playing wanes, you get up for a sandwich and wonder where you left GT4…
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