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CNET editors' rating:
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- Reviewed on: 05/03/2005
- Updated on: 05/06/2005
- Released on: 05/03/2005
- Originally published on GameSpot: Enthusia Professional Racing (PS2) Review
Enthusia Professional Racing looks to take the racing simulator fight directly to its high-profile PlayStation 2 rival, the much-lauded Gran Turismo series. Rather than following the path of many racing games on the same platform, looking to imitate the GT franchise's approach, Enthusia takes a very different--and sometimes innovative--approach to the collectible car game. While the game's touchy driving model and overly complex career mode won't appeal to everyone, Enthusia is a worthy game for those looking for something different in the four-wheel genre.
Enthusia is a driving game that places a premium on driving skill, not necessarily tuning knowledge. Sure there are options to adjust numerous handling settings on your car, but for the most part the game wants you behind the wheel fighting it out for first place in any of the game's more than 200 available cars. What this means from a gameplay standpoint is a driving engine that is sensitive and touchy, sometimes brilliant, and often frustrating. Firstly, if you think other driving games have perfected the springy feeling of suspension before, you obviously haven't played Enthusia yet. Weight transfer into and out of corners and under heavy braking is dramatically emphasized not only through the handling of the car but visually as well; cars will lurch under heavy braking, and unless you can carry momentum through a curve in as straight a line as possible, your lap times will suffer.
Working in tandem with the bouncy nature of the driving model is Enthusia's visual gravity system, a visual representation of the forces acting upon your car, tires, and even the driver itself. There are several types of VGS displays. The first is a small car icon that indicates the direction your front tires are facing, the amount of forces acting upon them, and the general direction of G-forces acting upon the car itself. The second display is a frame that shows forces acting both on the car and your virtual driver in a sort of screen-within-a-screen fashion. When you enter a turn, the screen will slightly shift left, right, up, or down to convey the forces working against your driver's head as he pilots the car. Illuminated onscreen arrows further illustrate the direction and power of the G-forces working against your car. Honestly, while the system is cool to look at, and seems remarkably sensitive to the slightest subtle movements of your car, it doesn't really present any sort of essential information that you can't get from the overall "feel" of the car itself. Luckily you can turn the displays off altogether if you want.
From a driving standpoint, first-time Enthusia racers will find that being quick on the track is as much an exercise in restraint as it is raw horsepower. The game's mostly fictional tracks blend some nice straights with tight and twisted hairpins that never let you feel complacent with the car's handling, and therefore braking distances and controlled turns should never be taken for granted. There's no shoving your car into a turn and hoping to powerslide your way around the apex; carefully modulated throttle and restrained braking will be your best friends in this game. Rear-wheel-drive cars are especially tough to drive in Enthusia, displaying a huge tendency for oversteer and requiring incredible amounts of patience (and driving touch) to be successful in. While the game touts an incredibly realistic physics engine, it's hard to believe rear-wheel-drive cars are this twitchy in real life. As one colleague put it to us, "If rear-wheel-drive cars handled in real life the way they do in Enthusia, no one would ever buy one."
Combine this with only a moderate sense of speed (bolstered somewhat through the use of stylized blur lines at the edge of the screen at high speeds), and you have a driving model that is complex in execution but often plodding in pace. To make matters worse, the cars entered into a race tend to be from a huge spectrum of performance abilities, and on longer races, the field tends to spread out pretty quickly so that even if you're in the middle of the pack positionwise, you may not have a car either behind or in front of you that's in sight.
Enthusia has several game modes to choose from, but the real meat of the game can be found in the so-called "Enthusia life" mode, Konami's sometimes innovative, sometimes frustrating take on a career mode. You won't be dealing with money for new cars; in fact, you'll be earning practically every car found in the game through race wins, albeit in a unique manner. In Enthusia, points are the new cash, and they come in several different flavors, and how points are awarded or taken away is almost entirely dependent on your performance on the track. Races take place on a week-by-week basis in Enthusia life mode, and during each week's race you have the opportunity to gain (or lose) positions in the overall in-game ranking system, with the ultimate goal of becoming the number-one-ranked driver. Enthusia's complex point system plays a strong role in just how quickly you can make that happen.
The first and arguably most important category of points you should know about are Enthu points, and there's a maximum number you can have at the beginning of each race. Any mistake you make on the course--be it running off the asphalt, striking a roadside obstacle, or coming into contact with your opposition--will decrease your Enthu points. After a race, you'll regain a portion of your Enthu points, and the number of points you regain after a race will increase as your driver level increases. The downside is that if your Enthu points are reduced to zero, you'll be forced to sit the following week out. Because Enthusia's ranking system counts only the best nine races of the last 12 weeks toward your overall rank, taking a week off in Enthusia can have a negative effect on your global position. Ranking and skill points are used to determine your weekly ranking and your overall driver and car-tuning levels, respectively. By using an odds system that calculates your chance of winning against all the other cars in the field, the ranking system encourages you to enter underpowered cars against tougher foes to gain more ranking points and thus improve your rank. Skill points let you upgrade your driver (to raise your Enthu points ceiling and rate of recovery of Enthu points from week to week) and also give you automatic car upgrades for things like brakes and tires.
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Where to buy
Enthusia Professional Racing (PS2):
$9.99 - $33.37
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