NASCAR 09 is a step-up from NASCAR 08, but EA's laziness has once again ruined the game.
One of the more major additions to this year's installment in the series is Jeff Gordon's involvement with you throughout the game. He does a lot more than just be the cover guy; he helps you with setting up your car, beginning your career, signing sponsors, and a variety of other things. He's actually kind of like your mentor. This essentially provides a better presentation for the game and generally presents a better overall experience.
Once you're ready to begin racing you can choose from one of the many race modes including Race Now, Season, and Own the Track. However, if you really want to get in on the major action, you'll want to start a career. The career mode is largely improved offering many new changes. You start off your career by entering an assortment of driver information. As soon as you finish with that, it's off to get a new paint job for your new ride in the craftsman truck series, nationwide series, or the sprint cup series. There are so many options when it comes to getting a paint job, that it is almost overwhelming. You design your number, the sponsors' size and position, whether you want waves, stripes, or flames on your car, and even how many decals you want. But the designing in the game isn't perfect; there are some spots on the car where you can't put sponsors, where in real life some drivers have them there. And your still can't choose a number for your car that is anything lower than 100, a long time complaint of fans of the series. Although, you can avoid all these problems by designing your very own car with an image editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, and uploading it into the game. Though, this is a painstakingly annoying process if you don't already have everything set up right. You have to download the template from the website, download an image editing program, if you don't already have one, and then spend the time creating your design. Once you've done that, you have to upload it onto the EA website, but you have to have an account with EA to accomplish this. So if you don't have one, you have to create one and then upload it onto the EA website. Finally, you have to upload it onto your PS3 and into the game. It all makes up for an extremely long and sometimes aggravating process.
When you complete your new paint job for your ride, you're then asked to sign some sponsors. Every sponsor has a set of obligations that are to be met in a certain amount of races. These can include things like leading a certain amount of laps, qualifying in a certain position every race, or having a specific average finishing position. But, the sponsors don't really make sense, you'll be signing sponsors every three or five races, which is tremendously unrealistic. In real life, drivers almost always have the same sponsors for the whole year of racing. Whether you're able to sign a certain sponsor depends on if you have enough reputation points. The more reputation points you have, the better the sponsors you can sign. Performance points dictate how good your car runs and how powerful it is. Both reputation points and performance points can be gained from racing well and completing some of the many 77 diverse Sprint Driver Challenges. These challenges can range from everything to making your way through the pack, beating a specific driver, or avoiding a big wreck. Sometimes these trials can be more exciting than actually racing because of how quick and intense they are. The bad thing is though, if you complete all the Sprint Driver challenges, or most of them, before you really get into your career, because of how many reputation points and performance points you'll have, you could be one of the best drivers in the sprint cup series in your first year. This is again, is not too life like. It's basically a cheap, easy way to cheat the career system. Career mode definitely could have been thought out better.
Out on the race track you can choose to head right into the action or decide to configure your car and test it out a little. You can tinker with pretty much everything you can in real life from oil temperature, your tire's psi, the wedge, to the brake pressure, and even play around with the vehicle's gears. Yet, if you're not a mechanic like most of us, you may opt to use the basic configuration option which is certainly more welcoming. There are four basic categories: Gearing, Handling, Downforce, and Suspension. Gearing allows you to make your car accelerate faster or be able to reach a higher top speed. Whether your car is tighter or looser depends on the handling option. Downforce is controlled by selecting if you want your vehicle to be faster or have more grip. And finally, Suspension allows you to choose if you want the suspension to be hard or soft. Still, if this is too hard for you, you might prefer to just load up the default rookie setup or the default veteran setup. This is a quicker and easier way to get right in on the action with a stable vehicle to race with.
As soon as you're happy with the setup of your stock car and you feel that you have practiced enough you can move on to qualifying. Qualifying for a race is simple enough, you take two full laps around the track to try to gain the best position, but sometimes it's a little too simple. It's possible to scrape the wall a few times and still grab the pole position on some settings, which is once again, terribly unrealistic.
While racing you have a choice of five different camera options to select from. These include two different back views, a camera from the hood, one from under the car, and an in-car option. These all can be interesting at times, though most will probably choose one of the back views. Plus, you can choose from two different racing styles in this year's installment, normal mode and pro mode. Normal mode is more forgiving and allows you to slide a little here and there, but still takes some precision behind the wheel. If you really want it to get intense and complicated, you can go with the pro driving model. Pro driving is a lot more tricky and intricate and can take some real practice to race well with it, so most drivers will just stick to the normal racing model.
Besides which driving model you decide to go with, the controls are actually quite accurate and responsive. It takes some fairly precise driving to control your car and not swerve off the track and into the grass on both driving models. Sometimes though, the controls can just feel a tad touchy and just, slightly off for some reason. Overall though, the controls are done pretty well and definitely show that EA put some effort into producing them.
The computer controlled AI is unquestionably better than previous years. If you accidentally scrape a car for maybe a mere second, that car isn't going to come back at you slamming its whole body into you, and causing a massive pile up of half the field like we've seen in earlier installments of the series. Albeit, your opponents won't just sit there and let you pass though, they will still be fighting for position, but you won't have to go through the extreme road rage like we've all seen in the past.
One thing that undeniably needs some work though, is the crashes. A lot of fans of NASCAR just love seeing the big crashes and pile-ups, well in NASCAR 09, you won't be seeing much of that. In a 500 mile race, you'd be lucky if you experience five yellow flags and you'll probably never see a big wreck. Most cautions consist of a car spinning out, somebody sliding into the grass, or a vehicle losing control and going into the wall. Usually there are at least two big wrecks in a race, but not in NASCAR 09. Occasionally, you'll go the whole race without seeing a single caution. It seems at times that the only way to cause a big huge wreck is to just slam yourself into a big pack of cars and see what happens. The crashes also just feel so phony and can sometimes look like they are physically impossible to do.
An additional problem with NASCAR 09 is the pitting. There are actually two problems here. To begin with, as soon as you enter pit road you totally lose control of the car, the only control you have is how many tires you want to change, how much gas you want, and the like. It's not a big problem, but it would still be nice to be able control your car all the way through pit road. However, the major problem is the time when you need to pit. During a race you'll have to go refuel and get new tires at certain times, which is normal. But, the problem is, sometimes you'll go pit and you'll be the only one, and the rest of the field won't pit for another 20 laps or so. Sure you could pit like that really early on purpose, but I was pitting when I seriously had to, and the rest of the field didn't have to pit for a while. This didn't always happen on every race, but it happened enough for me to get seriously annoyed with it. I don't know if it's just the way I was driving, or maybe just my copy of the game, but it is severely infuriating.
Another thing that looks to be missing in NASCAR 09 is the announcers. There isn't a single announcer in the entire game at all. Now I know some people just like to skip over all that announcer stuff, but several enjoy hearing those kinds of things, and removing it is just a negative in the game. There's no national anthem before the race, no "gentlemen start your engines," and nobody wrapping up the race after it's finished. When you press race, you go right into the field seconds before the race, and after it's finished, the only thing you can do is look at the results and exit back to the garage.
On the field though, NASCAR 09 sounds fantastic. The engines and the crowd sound very realistic, and at the end of a race the crowd gets louder. The spotter does a good job of letting you know about your surroundings and helping you traverse throughout the field and sounds very lifelike. NASCAR 09 also has a nice set of music tracks to listen to with bands such as Airbourne, Jet Black Stare, and Third Day. The tunes mix together a rock, country feel and provide the perfect mood for racing.
Online play has been only slightly improved this year. The field now allows 14 cars to race at the same time online instead of last year's 11. This is good, but it doesn't do too much to majorly alter the gameplay. Players can choose to race in a ranked or unranked game and decide if they would like to race with black flags, yellow flags, collisions, or a mixture of those few. On the other hand, often times it takes forever to get a race started and you spend a lot of time just waiting. Lag doesn't appear to be too bad, but it is still there slightly. Although online can be fun, it's not all that great and sometimes racing online can seem to be just a big battlefield instead of a race. Some will probably just stick to racing offline in their own career.
In terms of graphics the game actually looks pretty good. Almost everything from last year is improved somewhat in NASCAR 09. The tracks come across as quite realistic, and the background seems to be done very nicely, especially the sky. The cars look better and the look of the damage on the vehicles has also been enhanced. Overall, the graphics look great, but they're not stand-out thrilling and I've seen better.
Other than the career mode, there's not all that much of other things to do. You may wish to just race with Race Now, or select to create a Season, which is almost the same as Career Mode, except you can take an actual driver, although it's only for one year. There's always the Sprint Driver Challenges you can do, but they can get difficult and sometimes bothersome. You can try out Test and Tune but that's not really meant to offer hours of fun. There's plenty of statistics and history to look up, which can be interesting after you've played for a while. Furthermore, there's Own the Track, which is all about posting up the best stats for each track. What's more is the game has no trophies because of how it's from the middle of 2008. Basically, if you become uninterested with your career, sick of the online, and bored of the gameplay, it's unlikely that you'll ever be coming back to playing this game.
Overall, NASCAR 09 isn't too bad of a racer, but it just isn't enough. It seems that EA has once again got lazy and left out features, forgotten to fix some problems, and hasn't added that much of new stuff. Don't get me wrong though, NASCAR 09 is without doubt way better than NASCAR 08's piece of crap. If you're a big NASCAR fan and like the games, you'll probably want to pick this up. However, if you're just a casual fan or maybe you just like racing games and want to give this a try, you might want to skip this one and maybe wait for a better game to come, like Gran Turismo 5, or just buy a different game. EA has lost its license to make NASCAR games too, so this might be last official NASCAR game for quite a while, as NASCAR still hasn't given any developers the privilege to create a new game. If you really want a NASCAR game though, I would probably buy this one, just keep in mind that it's not perfect and not incredibly fun. Let's just hope that future NASCAR games will be developed better.
Ratings:
Graphics: 9.1/10.0
Sound and Music: 9.4/10.0
Gameplay: 6.3/10.0
Controls: 8.3/10.0
Enjoyment: 6.0/10.0
Online and Multiplayer: 6.4/10.0
Replay Value: 5.7/10.0
Overall Rating: 6.7/10.0