molydeus's Full Review: NASCAR 2001 for PlayStation 2
Let my start off by saying how glad I am that I rented this game and didn't purchase it. After playing for about 2 hours I was done with it.
Gameplay
There are several modes of gameplay, including, a two player mode, a career mode, and a single race mode.
In the career mode you pick from one of 20 real life drivers, and you race a season. There are quite a few settings you can personalize here. These include things like the difficulty setting and some basic, and advanced car settings. The car settings you can chose from depends on the difficulty level you've chosen. So if you choose the easiest one you'll have the most basic settings, if you choose the hardest one you'll get far more advanced car settings.
As you place in races you accumulate points, depending on several variables which include the number of laps you led the race for, and your final position. Each of the courses you race on are made after real race tracks.
You can adjust pretty much everything on the advanced car set up mode, from tire hardness to your flap's angle. While the simple car set up mode has just three choices to choose from. You can have good turning but bad top speed, bad turning but good top speed, and there's of course a middle setting that gives you average speed and turning. These settings need to be changed depending on the course you're racing.
As with all EA Sports game this one keeps very good stats. It will keep your total dollar earnings, your average finish spot, the number of top 10 finishes, the number of top 5 finishes, etc, etc.
The cars handle pretty well overall, with a few exceptions which I will get to later. The graphics overall look good, but again there are exceptions which I will get to later.
Two Player Mode
You can play single races two player, or a career. This is much more fun than a single player career mode, though there still is very little replay value.
Upgrades
Unlike most racing games you cannot upgrade your car, ever. All you can do is mess with the settings as I've discused before. You can never buy a new car, or buy a better engine, or upgrade parts. So all that money you win racing really doesn't mean anything at all.
Loses Two Stars for:
Big game engine problems. Whenever you start below about 15th in the race you will experience huge slow downs. The frame rate decreases greatly, and it gets very hard to control your car. This happens every time there are about 10 or more cars on your screen. It also happens in time in which you have the review mirror on.
Loses One Star for:
The lack of upgrades, and the fact that your car seems to lose no control after you've been in a wreck. You can smash in the entire front of your car and still be able to go 190mph and be able to turn with no problems. This is true in both simulation and arcade modes.
Also included in this lost star is it's lack of replay value. There's really nothing to do but race on the same tracks against the same people. While you can change the number of laps you race, it's still always the same tracks and the same people.
My Conclusion
If you're looking for a good PS2 racing game, look elsewhere. This game was obviously hurried so it could be released at the same time as the PS2. With more work this could have been a good game, but as it I'd recommend staying away from it. I'm thankful they put in an option so you only have to race 3% of the total laps.
This game could have profited from some Madden commentary, like "Ya know the object of racing is to pass the other guy."
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