Review by: Bob Mandel
Published: May 12, 2000

Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, the fifth installment in the most famous computer car racing series on the personal computer, takes a decidedly new direction from its predecessors. Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed franchise has sold an estimated ten million units to date, and it naturally wants to keep the momentum going. This latest installment focuses on just one automobile, the great German Porsche, instead of encompassing the major sports cars of the world. As a result, you can no longer test whether a Jaguar is faster than a Ferrari, the way you used to be able to do in earlier offerings, but you can learn everything there is to know about any cross-time or cross-model comparisons for the Porsche. Even though this series has been inching in the simulation direction in recent years, this newest release is still much more of an arcade racer than a racing simulation.

80 Porsche models spanning over 50 years of Porsche history are included, from the 1948 356 Roadster to the 2000 911 Porsche Turbo. This is a far cry from the 13 licensed car brands in both Need for Speed: High Stakes and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. You discover real distinctions among the performance characteristics of the various Porsche models as you compare them over time: For example, driving new cars with ABS and more powerful and efficient engines is a whole different experience from tooling around in automobiles from a couple of generations back. The comprehensive Porsche Chronicle included in Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed shows photographs, print media advertisements, and a video including some of the most famous Porsche models.

One of the nice features of the recent installments in the Need for Speed series has been the availability of downloadable cars from the web at regular intervals. For this latest release, Electronic Arts has already issued an add-on vehicle, the Porsche 911 GT2: it features a huge biplane rear spoiler, the six-cylinder Boxer twin turbo engine, lowered curb weight, and tremendous acceleration. What with each Porsche model distinctive in handling as well as in looks and sound, such an addition really does present a new kind of challenge for players, rather than simply being the exact same experience with just a different outside gloss — a pattern common to add-on cars in other offerings. The availability of downloadable extras of this sort thus significantly extends the replay value of the game.

In addition to five closed tracks, there are nine European open road courses, including new point-to-point courses with clearly visible (rather than hidden as in many racers) branching paths. These courses are quite long and diverse topographically, traversing locations such as France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. The attention to detail in the depiction of the villages in each country is amazing. These thrilling open road courses have been missing in recent installments in this series. The tracks are much more authentic than the imaginary environments in previous Need for Speed releases, yet they do not attempt to be completely authentic the way courses in Infogrames’ Test Drive series do. Unfortunately, of the 14 total track environments only four are available from the outset in Quick Race mode.