Nascar 2014 Review

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Nascar 2014 is a pretty standard racing game. In the single player career mode you will create a driver and pick the manufacturer of your car. I found no real difference between the manufacturers so there was no real incentive to play as one make over another. The season is made up of the normal races you would expect to see and it features tracks from the Nascar circuit. I don’t know much about Nascar, other than watching Days of Thunder but I’m sure that Nascar fans will love driving around the Daytona track at 200 mile per hour but it didn’t hold a great deal of interest to me.

Each race will start with practice laps where you can get to know the track, you will also have qualifying sessions that will lead up to the race itself. I found that when I tried to play the game as a simulator, that is to say with the penalties and flags on, that it was an exercise in controller breaking frustration. I found that any AI driver that I connected with would spin out, I would get a caution and the pace car comes out. I wouldn’t mind if this was a rare instance but even when an AI controlled car hit me and spun out that I still got the caution. In one particular race the pace car came out eight times without me being able to complete a single lap. This completely took me out of the moment and ruined the entire experience for me. Once I turned the flags off Nascar 2014 got a new breath of life. When collision’s and car damage is activated the entire game becomes a tribute to Destruction Darby. I had great fun playing though in this configuration.

You can take the experience online or play with a friend in local split screen and it adds another layer of competition and fun to the game.

As you win races you will gain sponsors and if you display their logo on your car you will get extra cash for upgrading your car and for research and development. R&D will allow you to upgrade your car’s engine, chassis, body, suspension and breaks, this is absolutely vital if you want to keep those pole positions.

Nascar 14 isn’t a particularly good looking game, the detail on the crowd and the track is incredibly bland in indistinct. During daytime races even the cars don’t look that good. The visual damage to the car does look very nice if you get a chance to see it, paint will be scraped from the side of your car and dents will appear after a collision, unfortunately you likely won’t get much of a chance to appreciate this during the race, if you do you will likely crash, on the plus side there will be a new dent to look at.

Nascar 2014 is at its best visually during night races. The lighting effects and reflections on the cars on the track are fantastic, I just wish some of this had been carried over to the races during the day.

I was slightly disappointed with the audio during the races. The engine sounds are realistic and instil a sense of actually being at the event and in the menus between races there is a pretty good soundtrack. The reason I was disappointed was that during the race itself there is no music. I would have much preferred driving round the track to some rock anthems, especially after the twentieth lap when I started to get bored. You will also have your pit crew speaking to you during the race, while the voice acting isn’t of the standard of a AAA game it is still perfectly respectable for what the game is.

You can play Nascar as many times as you like, you can change the difficulty to an astounding degree to make sure that you will always be challenged. While I didn’t find there to be much to bring me back to the game If you are a fan of the racing genre in general or you love Nascar then you can play this well after the tyres have blown out.

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