When Juiced was first announced last year, I made sure I checked out the demo and I was impressed with what I saw, after all how many good racing games have come out for the PC in the past few years? However, 8 months and a few hiccups later, the game dissapoints on all fronts. The gameplay is mildly exciting at best. The career mode has no real storyline and all you are doing is race after race without any real sense of direction. The handling of the cars is horrible; cars handle the same at 100mph as they do at 25mph and the oversteer really gets annoying after a few races. It is ridiculously easy to lose money in this game, this doesn't seem to be a problem early on in the game with free races, but later on it comes back to bite you in the rear end. If you lose enough money, and believe me you will, you are pretty much "stuck" until you can find a free race on the calender, which can take forever. It seems that in the 8 month wait all THQ managed to do was slap a few intro videos together and not much else. Not only are they missing the big picture but they mess up the smaller aspects of the game too. For example when u try to change your control configuration, the game minimizes and it launches another utility so that you can change your controls; there is no ingame control config menu and to make things worse, instead of assigning keys to controls, your assigning controls to keys...so basically they have all the alphanumeric characters and u have to choose what control goes to what character. On the brighter side, the online mode of the game seems to hold up well, you can race for pink slips as well as the standard race modes. The graphics in the game are pretty darn good, the cars look a little dithered at times but other than that, the environment and the rest seem well crafted. The sound of the engines and environments leave much to be desired although the game does feature a nice soundtrack. All in all, Juiced just tries to do different things to the racing genre, but it just ends up taking things away from the racing experience. Sitting around and watching your "crew" race isn't exactly my idea of fun. It is not really hard to do well in the racing genre especially for the PC since there are very few games competing,if Juiced had stuck to the racing element of things rather than all the other distractions in the game, this one would have turned out much better. It would have also helped if the game kept it's initial release date rather than being released months after NFSU2 and other racers. In the end it just ends up looking like a carbon copy of earlier racing games with annoyances thrown in. The game is worth checking out if you are a racing fan and have run out of options for PC games.
First of all, you need some other controller than Keyboard for this one, I played it on Joystick and it was good, but the ability to control acceleration still made it a bit difficult. I believe Steering wheel with pedal... Read Full Review
I'm stunned, why is the ratings so high, i've been in more intresting maths lessions... The graphics are bad, the handling was crazy, there was no plot, the manu screen made me dizzy, the cars looked poor and don't get ... Read Full Review
