Shanghai Street Racer PC

Shanghai Street Racer are car races, but they have little to do with painfully realistic productions. The authors, employees of the Dutch company Team6 (known from other budget titles, such as Manhattan Chase and Taxi Racer New York 2), decided to do a game that is only dexterity - that is, where to win it is necessary to simply rush ahead and at most to make sure not to get out of the route by accident.

For this reason, many elements of the game have been simplified significantly. So there is no model of destruction at all - even hitting a railing or other car with a huge force causes the vehicle to only spread a rain of golden sparks around it and still looks just as good as it did before the accident. This means that breakage also has no influence on driving the vehicle and it always behaves in the same way, even though in reality it may already be incapable of driving. Thanks to this, however, the player can drive as fast as possible and pay no attention to anything, because lanterns or trees standing by the road are not an obstacle for him.

The creators have prepared three play modes for single-player players: Time Attack (time race), Single Race (single race) and Championship (championship). The authors also made available several different tracks and cars, and allowed to choose the number of laps during the race (maximum ten). In multiplayer mode, which is available only via LAN, several live players can race against each other at the same time.

In terms of audiovisual setting Shanghai Street Racer cannot compete with the biggest productions of the genre, but as for a budget game it looks quite good. All the more so because the authors used a number of different special effects for the graphics, and the whole thing was complemented by atmospheric music and appropriate sounds.

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Last updated on 10 December 2007