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GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
OK
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 11/18/2006
- Released on: 11/14/2006
- Originally published on GameSpot: GT Pro Series (Wii) Review
It slices, it shoots, it...drives a car? That's right, the Wii Remote can add serving as a steering wheel to its list of uses thanks in part to Ubisoft's racing game GT Pro Series. The concept of using the remote to steer a vehicle is used in other games--and will no doubt be used by many others many more times to come--but what makes GT Pro Series unique is that it takes the concept a step further and turns the Wii Remote into a wheel. Specifically, the game comes packaged with a small plastic steering wheel that has a slot that you can fit the Wii Remote into and then use as you would any other steering wheel to control your onscreen vehicle. It's a novel idea that's fun for a few minutes, but the enjoyment quickly fades, and you're left with an ugly, unexciting racing game.
The steering mechanic is fun for a few minutes, but after an hour or so you'll be wishing for another way to race.
GT Pro Series is a road racing game featuring real-world vehicles from Japanese manufacturers such as Honda, Subaru, Toyota, and Nissan. It's a very straightforward game of racing on some very generic tracks with broad corners to encourage drifting. It's all very bare-bones stuff that has appeared in countless other racing games. The only interesting element of GT Pro Series is the way you control the car. You hold the Wii Remote so the buttons are facing you, and then you tilt it left and right to steer your car. The included steering wheel casing for the Wii Remote makes it so that you have an actual wheel that you can turn, rather than just tilting the remote. The way the remote is positioned in the wheel, it's easy to reach the 1 and 2 buttons to use your brake and gas, respectively.
The wheel makes it easier to manipulate the remote, but the control isn't very responsive. You have to turn the wheel a full 90 degrees on most corners, and since the game relies a lot on drifting, you usually need to quickly turn the wheel in the opposite direction to right yourself when you're coming out of a turn. This results in a lot of exaggerated back-and-forth turning movements that just aren't much fun after the first lap of a race. It also doesn't help that there's no resistance or feedback, and the whole setup is fairly lightweight. So even though it's fairly easy to control your car, it doesn't ever feel like there's a strong connection between the wheel and the car. There's also a bit of lag in the controls, which is a good thing, because if the remote picked up every little twitch, your car would probably be all over the place. At the same time, this means that the game won't read quick reactions, so if you're trying to avoid an opponent or correct yourself before smashing into a wall, you'll have to start steering much further in advance than you're probably used to.
GT Pro Series compensates for the somewhat loose controls by emphasizing drift cornering typical of arcade-style racing games, rather than the precise, technical style of racing you'd find in a simulation. It's easy to simply tap the brake going into a corner, then turn the wheel and hit the gas to initiate a powerslide that will take you through a turn without diminishing your speed. It can be a bit tricky to control a drift and to know when to steer out of it, but the game is forgiving enough that you should be able to get the hang of it in just a few minutes. Even so, the turn-gas-slide routine gets old quickly, and there isn't much challenge to whipping your car around turns. In fact, aside from when you need to initiate a drift, you can get away without ever touching your brakes in most races.
That isn't to say the races don't get challenging. At first, the computer-controlled opponents are easy to beat, and you probably won't have a hard time taking the gold cup in your first dozen or so race events. Eventually the artificial intelligence does put up more of a fight, but it still feels mechanical. You'll never see opponents leave their lines unless you bump them off course, and as you progress in the game, your opponents will start driving faster, until eventually you have to run a perfect race if you hope to take first place. It also doesn't help that you always start out dead last no matter how you did in the previous race, which means that you'll spend the first half of a lap wading through a mob of 11 other racers until you get in position to make a move on the leader.
There's a good selection of real-world cars in the game, but they all look pretty bad.
GT Pro Series (Wii):
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