Need For Speed II: Special Edition - Review

Author: Legendary Date: Sep 20 2004 - 18:32 Score: 45 points

This game is a real Abandonware classic. It's very addicting, even nowadays. Some improvements have been made on with the oldest of the Need For Speed series: better graphics and more tracks unless it's build on exactly the same engine it looks better. Need For Speed II offers about 10 tracks, with a different difficulty for every scenario. The higher the difficulty, the more hills, the more turns the track will have. The tracks are looking nice, some eye on detail. For example the roads and some scenery are looking quite realistic for the year it was made. It also has, in the car menu, a movie of the cars like in the original Need For Speed game.

The Gameplay is quite well made. Each car has its own ups and downs. For example the Jaguar is quite fast but the handling is bad and the Ferrari F50 has everything in the middle: average speed and average handling. There are nice and challenging game modes. One of them is the tournament: You have to race a few races and at the end the player with the most points wins. Number 1 gets eight points, number 2 six points etc... There is also a free race: There you can practice your skills or drive against the computer. And last but not least there is the knock-out mode. There you have to race against the computer and every time the last one on a round is 'knocked-out' and that player has lost. The last player who is left, has won the race. As you can see there are some nice game modes that will keep you playing for a while. You've to complete the tournament and knockouts to unlock some cars and a "secret" track but you can also do this with some cheats, check our cheat selections for the cheats. The only, maybe funny, con is that when you bump into a car, you and the other car will fly over-pused into the air.

The graphics are not bad, but not good either. The scenery around you looks quite flat, for example the mountains and the trees will not move but it looks like they are moving because of the extremely high speeds like 150Mph or even more, in that case you won't even notice it. The cars on the other hand are well made. Good eye of detail and color usage. I would recommend to play it on a resolution of 800x600 pixels because on any other bigger size the graphics will only decrease more because the detail level goes down or the screen resolution.

The sound is very realistic: You can hear the engine nice when you start. When you press the forward button you'll hear a realistic engine sound. When you slide into a turn you hear the rubber of the tires over the road. Very cool. The plus which is certain in this game are the sounds and music.

On the whole this is a quite good racing game and a must have for Need For Speed fans. This game will keep you busy for a while. With eight new tracks, three special cars and a secret track this game is surely worth a try.

	Title / Type	Submitter	Date
	Review	Legendary	Sep 20 2004

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