Street Legal Review

Street Legal is hard to recommend to any racing fans who aren't willing to wait on the next patch.

There's a very good reason street racing is looked upon with such disdain: It kills and seriously injures hundreds of competitors and innocent bystanders every year. With Street Legal, Hungarian-based developer Invictus offers a far less hazardous alternative--one that attempts to virtually replicate the entire street racing experience, from the car lot to the garage and ultimately to the inherently dangerous urban competitions. To say that it didn't succeed would be a serious understatement. Despite a great concept, an impressively realistic approach, and several moments of hidden glory, Street Legal is clearly one of the most flawed games of 2002. So flawed, in fact, that a 30MB patch has already been released, and another is on the way.

Street Legal might have an intriguing concept, but it's too unstable to enjoy.
Street Legal might have an intriguing concept, but it's too unstable to enjoy.

Detailing all that's wrong with Street Legal right out of the box would probably take a while, but suffice it to say that no aspect of the game other than its audio is free of errors and bugs. You'll know something is amiss when you attempt to install and are compelled to wait for five to 10 minutes for the process to complete. And that's if you're lucky. We found ourselves mercilessly booted during install on more than one occasion, and several times during gameplay as well.

As bizarre as the game's installation routine is, navigating through its menus is infinitely more annoying. For some unknown reason, the developer included a ridiculously fast-moving mouse pointer that's difficult to use, especially because each menu item is so dreadfully tiny. As a result, you may be forced to utilize the keyboard for those menus that support it. Unfortunately, some of Street Legal's menus don't.

All of the above pales in comparison with the game's controller support. We auditioned several control devices with Street Legal, including the Saitek Cyborg and Microsoft Precision joysticks, a Logitech Formula Force GP wheel and pedal unit, and a Thrustmaster Firestorm Dual Power gamepad. The good news is that the wheel functioned correctly before the patch and both the wheel and the pad functioned after the patch. The bad news is that we were never able to get the game to properly recognize either stick, even after we'd downloaded and installed the massive patch and loaded the game on two separate systems. Your results may vary, but these problems have been acknowledged and are apparently being worked on for the game's next patch. In the interim, many players will have to drive with their keyboards, which just doesn't cut it for serious driving game enthusiasts.

If you somehow manage to get past all those issues, you'll undoubtedly be horrified by the game's dismal graphics engine. On different test systems (a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 and a 1.4GHz Athlon, both with GeForce 4-based graphics cards), Street Legal performed so poorly as to be unplayable. Even at 640x480 resolution and the lowest detail settings, the game runs at a sub-glacial frame rate with some of the worst clipping and draw-in we've seen in a racing game in some time. Vehicles suddenly materialize on previously empty strips of road. The action freezes at least once every few seconds for hard drive access.

In the game's car lot, where new vehicles are purchased from a selection of 3D static images, the rendering is so slow and so deficient that some vehicles are never fully drawn. Of greater concern is the brutal rendering in the garage, where you perform all repairs and upgrades. In the garage, you must manually remove parts before you can install other parts, and this already time-consuming procedure is made much more difficult by the fact that parts occasionally seem to evaporate for no reason at all.

Upgrading the game with its first patch improves the situation only marginally, and it doesn't seem to do anything for the hyperactive mouse pointer in the game's menus, or for controller support or clipping.

Embarrassing graphical glitches like these are common in the game.
Embarrassing graphical glitches like these are common in the game.

Yet for all that is wrong with Street Legal--and there is plenty--there are also several telltale signs of hidden greatness. In fact, if you really look hard, you'll see that the developer once had the makings of a slick and original simulation for players who like to be both drivers and mechanics. How the game ended up in its current state is anyone's guess.

Street Legal was obviously designed with gearheads in mind. You begin the game with $22,000 burning a hole in your pocket and a singular desire to assemble and race the coolest car in town. You'll start at the car lot, where you select your mode of transportation. If you choose a low-budget beater, you'll have more money to spend on upgrades and repairs. If you opt for a classy sports car, you'll have less money for upgrades, but you'll stand a better chance of winning races without first enhancing your equipment.

However, much of the game's appeal lies in its garage. Invictus has designed a complex and sophisticated upgrade system with hundreds of available parts. If you want a new engine block, you have a dozen choices at your disposal. If you want a new set of tires, you can browse through scores of options before hitting upon something that fits your budget. Furthermore, most parts are licensed replicas of real-life equipment from respected high-performance manufacturers such as BFGoodrich and Bilstein.

Fortunately, Street Legal's crashes are at least somewhat satisfying.
Fortunately, Street Legal's crashes are at least somewhat satisfying.

But again, installing your new components is a complex procedure that's more suitable for serious gearheads than for fans of quick action. Nevertheless, one of the most impressive aspects of the garage setup routine is the physical reaction of your vehicle. If you drop in a heavy piece of equipment, the car sinks noticeably into its suspension system. If you remove a wheel, it tilts noticeably at that corner, though for some reason, you won't know if a given component will fit your vehicle until you've purchased it and tried it on for size, so you'll have to run through far too many unnecessary experiments.

Whether in the garage or on the road, a Street Legal car always displays its latest modifications. We installed two fancy new sway bars, each colored a brilliant red, and were pleased to see those sway bars fixed to our undercarriage as we hurtled end-over-end during a particularly nasty collision. If you win enough races and accumulate enough money, you can transform even the plainest beater into a glorious monument to automotive excess. You can paint it with bright colors, throw on some monstrous rear slicks, and add frivolous items such as decals, sports mirrors, and high-end headlamps.

Street Legal goes to great lengths to portray the advantages and disadvantages of your new performance parts. If you install a massive engine in a lightweight car but neglect to upgrade other areas to support all that increased power, you'll definitely notice a difference in the way your car handles. If your car's braking and suspension systems can't handle all that newfound speed and power, you'll submarine under heavy braking and roll substantially in fast turns. Small cars with big engines vibrate visibly as they idle.

More importantly, Street Legal cars exhibit semirealistic driving physics. Stopping and acceleration times are authentic, and cornering is quite believable. The entire suspension system compresses when you drive over a curb, and elongates when the load is light. Unfortunately, the control in general is fairly loose. This is problematic because of Street Legal's terrible frame rate, which forces you to make steering and braking adjustments later than you otherwise would.

At least Street Legal's accidents provide good entertainment value. In harsh collisions, you'll wedge yourself under other cars or catapult yourself into the air. Fenders will bend, lamps will extinguish, and bumpers and doors will detach. Even relatively minor accidents might bend your frame so much that the driver or passenger door pops open when you take a turn. But because of the game's unpolished graphics engine, you'll sometimes find yourself stuck in your crunched car as it becomes partially submerged in the road or clumsily caught up in a bit of incidental scenery.

But the action is usually over before you know it.
But the action is usually over before you know it.

And unfortunately, Street Legal does not offer compelling scenarios. Once you've designed a suitable machine, you'll head for the streets and search for a likely competitor. This search is one of the most maddening aspects of the game, because it's tedious and repetitive. As you drive, you'll come across many poorly rendered vehicles, police cars, and pedestrians who have stepped out of their cars--but none will actually race you. When you finally do find a competitor, you're taken to map view, where you can see your route and choose how much money you'll wager. But less than a minute later, the event is over and you're off to search for another challenger. Fortunately, the actual races do get fast and furious. A little gentle bumping is well within the rules, and it's certainly rewarding to send your opponent right into another car or some nearby scenery, but the game's sloppy control and problematic frame rate make this far more difficult than it should be.

However, Street Legal features impressive sound that perfectly re-creates the rumble of a hot rod, as well as the squeal of tires. The game also has decent ambient sounds. Hopefully you enjoy audio more than multiplayer games, because Street Legal has no multiplayer component--and no camera replays or instruction manual, either.

Somewhere inside Street Legal is an innovative and enjoyable game just waiting to escape. But as it is now, the game is just one more reason budget games have such a bad reputation. Street Legal is virtually unplayable out of the box, and it's not much better when patched, so it's hard to recommend to any racing fans who aren't willing to wait on the next patch--and hope that the next patch somehow fixes all the problems in this otherwise promising game.

The Good

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The Bad

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