Juiced! Review

Ready to Get Juiced?

Street racing games packed with import cars are about as common these days as fat people outside Subway. It just seems like everyone wants a piece of the action ever since Need for Speed Underground blew the exciting sub-genre wide open. Now arrives Juiced, a new racer from THQ that saw countless setbacks before it could finally hit the tracks. How did this aspiring tricked-out racer end up?

Well, first off Juiced combines features from many different games. While it features handling and the cool import cars of titles like the aforementioned NFSU from EA, Juiced features absolutely no cops or traffic to dodge through. Disappointing indeed, since dodging idiot drivers is what makes street racing so much fun in the first place.

Most of your time will be spent racing through the single player career mode. Sadly, while this is the main focus of the game, it also received the least amount of polish. Money is hard to come by, respect is lost too easily and without you even doing anything wrong yourself, and the cars have the handling of a school bus sometimes. Polish is the most important word in a racing game, and Juiced just doesn't feature any of it.

Other modes you might find yourself putting some time into include the arcade mode, race builder, and multiplayer. All these modes could have been fun additions indeed if only the general mechanics of the game had more attention paid to them. It is truly sad when a mere flick of the control stick can send you out of control when you aren't holding down on the gas. I mean, just come on. That is sad.

At least the game looks pretty good. The tracks are generally well designed and presented. The cars look gorgeous and were excellently modeled by the development team. Each import was designed with the utmost detail and they can all be heavily customized. The game doesn't feature a crash system like the popular Burnout games, but the crashes are still decently modeled onto the cars.