18 out of 18 people found this review helpful.
great racing sim!!!
Date of Review: Sep 20, 1999
Let me start off by stating I own the original Need For Speed, Need For Speed 2SE, Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit, and now Need For Speed: High Stakes. Henceforth, I'll refer to this game as NFSHS.
This is by far the best in the series. Finally, there is a purpose to racing, aside from going round and round on the tracks and finding neat ways to wreck your car! You get very realistic graphics and sounds that are easily managed (to shut items off if you've got a slower system). The sound is awesome, especially if you lower the volume on the music (I don't care for the heavy metal soundtracks).
NFSHS takes off where Need For Speed 3 left off. You again get beautiful tracks, this time taken from various parts of the world. You race during the day, at night, in the rain, and in the snow. However, you need to actually learn how to drive in this game! While Need For Speed 3 had interactive items, such as street signs, traffic, etc. that could mess up your track time, NFSHS goes a step further: your car is damaged as you strike other objects. You sustain damage to your engine, steering, body, and suspension. All cars are susceptible to damage, not just yours, so don't worry about the game cheating you!
Like Need for Speed 3, you do have a hot pursuit mode, where the cops chase you, or you can chase the cops. However, unlike Need For Speed 3, you now have three different hot pursuit games, and you can be the bad guy or the cops in each of the schemes.
What is really neat, and gives this racing simulation a PURPOSE, is the new career mode. You start off with $25000.00 in cash, and you purchase a low end car (because that's all you can afford). As you win races, you win more money. As you win more money, you are able to buy more cars, or you're able to upgrade cars you have, which allows your car to go faster, turn better, etc. As you WRECK your car, you have to spend money to REPAIR the vehicle. At the end of each series of races is a HIGH STAKES race, where you race your car against an opponent of a similar class of car as you. If you win the race, you win his car. If you lose the race, you lose your car. When you end your playtime in Career Mode, the computer saves your game to disk automatically (there's no going back if you lose your car and re-loading the game to start over!), and the next time you enter the race, you pick up where you left off.
After you finish each race in the set of races, you move on to the next race set. There are several race sets (over 10) with different combinations of different courses at various times of day in different weather conditions in different directions. As you can imagine, you're rarely doing the same race twice, which is also fun.
NFSHS also imports in tracks from Need For Speed 3, so, after you've become used to those tracks, you can try them out in a more realistic simulation than what you were used to... mastering those tracks again takes a lot more skill, and you'll once again happily frustrate yourself trying to re-learn the courses!
Finally, there are hundreds of websites offering new cars to integrate into the NFSHS game (along with Need For Speed 3). I always have fun test driving someone else's car on a track I'm getting used to, a lot of these cars are even more realistic than what Electronic Arts provides you!
If you want to compare this game to others, there is no real comparison. I have the Test Drive series and I have Midtown Madness, and this blows the doors off the others!
My hardware is set up as follows:
P2-350 with 128mb of RAM
Diamond Monster 3D-2 12mb PCI VooDoo2 card
ATI Rage Pro 8mb AGP card
DirectX 6.1
Gravis BlackHawk joystick
50x CD-ROM
** NOTE ** While a joystick is not required, it does make gameplay a lot easier! Electronic Arts says you can use a steering wheel with this game, but they recommend a joystick.
