Some good, nothing great. This review includes a video with game footage.
http://www.gamespot.com/v/IHBhkGb55b8KvDLY
Juiced 2 Video review Score: 7.5
Juiced 2 is the second in the series of arcade racing games from THQ.
You start off competing in a race, winning some cash, and then set out to buy your own vehicle.
From there you will go on to complete racing goals to advance your rank and the class of car you can purchase. All of the cars in Juiced 2 are licensed, so it goes with our saying that there is no damage model.
Juiced 2 Offers two very distinct and different driving styles. These styles are separated into the categories of drifting and circuit. Drifting races send you careening down slip& slide tracks where your car will be afforded very minimal traction. While the circuit tracks are more traditional street races.
One of the major flaws in this separation is that the two styles never converge. On drifting tracks you drift all of the time which is fine for those races. Yet on circuit tracks where there are corners you could drift around, you probably shouldn’t, as you will slow down enough for the AI to overtake you.
The learning curve on the drifting is very steep. There is no practice mode or tutorial that informs you how to “side-slide” your car correctly so it’s mostly just trial and error.
The game offers a verity of modes to race, in most of which are fine, yet some are horribly broken.
The Last man standing mode, for instance, requires you to race around the track with-out touching the walls, but the game never requires you to leave the starting line. So you can sit and wait wile the other cars do their laps and run into barriers. You get a win without doing anything. This game, like many others uses Rubberband AI to supposedly keep the races more exciting and even. Unfortunately, this same AI makes up ground on you unrealistically fast. This results in many races where you blow by other racers, only to have them catch up and beat you in the final lap.
Juiced 2 lacks a sense of speed. With-out looking at the speedometer it is very difficult to tell how fast you are going causing many unnecessary crashes in corners. The only visual cue as to how fast you are going shows up at 80 mph when the sides of the screen blur minorly.
You will get some limited car customization, but it suffers from many flaws. Customization is confined to “clip-art” decals and uninspired paint jobs. While it does offer a layering system, the interface it uses isn’t very good.
All in all, Juiced 2 does a lot of things good, but nothing great. There is nothing to stand this title out form the plethora of racing titles that grace the shelves of stores this year.