European Street Racing Preview

ESR offers three game modes and three race types: career, ghost, and multiplayer modes and drift racing, city racing, and challenge racing.

• Career mode is just what you would expect for this type of racing game. You start off with €32,850 to purchase your first vehicle (three of them are within your limits), and have to win races in order to earn money and unlock new tracks. 
• Ghost mode gives you a chance to race against yourself once you have completed a track. This mode is offered to help correct any common errors and to improve your lap times.
• Multiplayer mode isn’t available yet with this early preview build (well... no servers anyways) but I’m glad Team6 and XIDER have decided to include it in the final release. Racing against real players should be even more entertaining and challenging and should add many hours to the game. In fact, I’m usually upset when a game doesn’t have some sort of multiplayer mode or includes one that obviously wasn’t a main focus.

As far as the racing modes go, I only had the chance to try the city and challenge races (which are mostly the same other than the number of people you’re racing against). City racing is what you’ll be doing the most and is just what it sounds like. Challenge racing is a one-on-one personal battle between racers who either have it out for one another or simply want to race for fun. For example, after one of the general races one of the competitors challenged me to a race. With this offer I was presented with the opportunity to unlock a new car model.  Drift racing, or drifting, is of course the more recently popular driving technique where the rear slip angle is greater than the front slip angle and the front wheels are pointing in the opposite direction of the turn.

The game also includes twelve car models which resemble current popular Euro cars. While I didn’t get a chance to try more than a couple of them I would say that there should be enough variety to keep players entertained.

Tuning your automobile and keeping it in top shape is an important element of the game. Before each race you can change the gear and tire ratios: acceleration vs. speed and grip vs. speed (as seen in the screenshot to the right). I left the gauges right in the center for London, which was more of an open race (more space on the roads), but moved both sliders to the left a bit for Paris, which has many tight roads and requires high maneuverability. This menu also gives you the option to upgrade your engine, gearbox, buy nitro, and change the paint color. Tuning doesn’t cost anything but buying the upgrades will set you back. Selling your vehicle or making repairs are also options here.

There are a total of four difficulty modes available when you first create your profile: easy, normal, hard, and very hard. For this preview I only used the normal mode but found it to be challenging. Your AI adversaries try to nudge you to the side whenever you come close and will hit you from behind if you slow down. However, obstacles that you come across in ESR are what really make things challenging. Because this is street racing, everything you can imagine will get in your way. There seemed to be plenty of traffic on the roads in both directions, and there were all sorts of impediments strewn throughout the maps such as construction cones and related objects, guard rails, street lights, birds, telephone booths, etcetera. This combined with narrow streets and sharp turns create a very challenging environment.

As far as the graphics are concerned, when I first saw the screenshots from the game I honestly wasn’t all that impressed. After starting up the preview build and upping the resolution things are much better than I had originally expected. That being said though, the graphics are somewhat average compared to some of the recent Need for Speed games for example. There is a bloom effect that is used which makes some things look nice but it is overused a bit in some cities. The same might be said about the motion blur effects. Visuals aren’t as important when it comes to racing games because everything is moving by so quickly but I think the cars and the drivers in the cars could use more detail.  

Sound and music seemed appropriate and well done. Rock music plays throughout the races and seemed to fit the intense atmosphere – like most racing games, make one wrong turn and you’ll be at the end of the pack. The other sounds such as the engine noises and the chaos during crashes, which occur often with all of the obstacles involved, are what you would expect from this type of racing game.

One random small issue that I hope is resolved before the final release is the car placement after a respawn. After respawning I expected to be placed facing the correct direction but this didn’t seem to be the case. I’d fall in the water in Paris, hit the respawn button, and would be placed on the edge of the road facing the water – driving right in it again because I would keep my finger on the accelerate button. The respawn button also seems to be a bit slow to respond. There were several times that I hit it twice thinking the first time hadn’t worked.

Overall, I’d say European Street Racing seems like a fun and challenging game at this point. It would be ideal if the graphics could be improved upon before the final release but it’s not as important, at least to me, when it comes to a racing game. Multiplayer should add quite a bit to the replay value of the game and the different racing types should keep things entertaining.