The Need for Speed series rests in a special place in many of our hearts. While others may cite Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit as their favourite, I'll always remember Need for Speed 2 because you could put in a cheat and drive as a log.

Clearly someone important at EA Black Box felt the same way, because Need for Speed ProStreet puts you in control of your very own log. Well, it's not a log, it's a Pagani Zonda or an R34 Skyline or any of the cool cars in the game but the point is they all drive like blocks of wood. I set the game on "King" difficulty mode (no assists or anything) and it still seemed like I was babied around the track.

Still, maybe it's my roots in tree driving, but I just didn't care about the handling. I've never particularly played the NFS games for a Gran Turismo experience anyway, so I wasn't expecting it. Instead, what I was expecting was going X to the Z on some of the most exotic rides in the world. This is where ProStreet excels - more than any other game so far.

Not all the best of the best cars are available however... There's no Mercedes or Ferraris, no Bugatti Veyron or McLaren F1, but it covers the rest perfectly. From the Evo X to the Lamborghini Murcielago, the game caters to your need for speed exceptionally. And the amazing part is they're (almost) all fully customisable. The prototype Nissan GT-R has to stay stock, but the rest can be "sculpted" to your hearts desire.

That's right, the Autosculpt feature from Need For Speed Carbon is back. This time however, it isn't just for making your spoiler unnecessarily high... It actually affects the aerodynamics of your car, increasing your top speed and grip. This is a novel way to make you think about how you slide your sliders, but it typically just results in you pushing them to 100% on the body kit and getting artsy on your other parts - it takes away from the precision a little.

PS as a racer is a little disappointing. Ignoring the handling issues, the whole game feels far too easy. It's too simple to win races when you've tuned your car far above that of any of your opponents. Worse, the game gives you a great car to start with, which means you can make a lot of money quite early in the game. On top of that, the damage modelling that EA hyped is severely underwhelming - totalling a car is typically spectacular, your car flipping and bouncing like a car would, but you'll quickly find the car is quite intact despite the punishment it just went through. The AI is lame as well, but this might just be a result of my super powered cars. I never thought I'd miss it, but at least the catch-up logic kept races interesting.

The four race modes - drag, drift, grip and speed are... weird. The first two are self-explanatory, grip is a circuit race and speed is a race from A to B. What's weird is when you purchase a car the game forces you to pick one of these modes for it. Once chosen, your car is locked to this race mode - meaning you can't race it anywhere else. This is, for want of a better word, retarded. They eliminate the stupid class system from Carbon where cars were exotics, tuners or muscle cars, and then impose stupider restrictions on them? You can now buy whatever car you want when you get the chance, but you can only race it in one mode? The game even inexplicably allows you to apply three different blueprints to each car, but they're all stuck in the same race mode, so there's no point. This is a restriction caused by the new game mode clearly - if the game was still illegal street racing drag racing, my drift spec'd Integra would see me winning anyway - once VTEC kicked in, yo.

The urban theme, by the way, is horrible. The whole street racer vibe to recent NFS games has been horrible - though tolerable for the sake of giving the game background some weight. With the illegal street racer theme eliminated and annoying announcers added, it's now unbearable. The story puts you in the shoes of a driver who is insulted by another racer - you must beat everyone to show him who the greatest is. It's hard to expect Shakespeare from a game about car racing, but why not just follow suit from other games - no story at all.

The music is as poor as the announcing. As always you can just turn it off, but it's a bit of a legacy for the game since it went urban - my brain automatically tunes out on pounding house tracks combined with EXTREME! dialog thanks to NFS Underground's conditioning.

The Need for Speed series has never been about legal racing. The reason people ignored the superior log racing aspect of NFS 2 to fawn over Hot Pursuit was because the illegal racing thing was such a huge factor in the game. The other games all focussed on dodging cops, weaving through traffic and hot cars, but this one only sees one of those factors. It's practically Forza 2 with more body customisation and an urban theme.

I'd probably buy NFS ProStreet if it was far cheaper. I'd definitely get it on a console as playing it with a keyboard is imprecise and I imagine the multiplayer would be better using friends lists as well. If you enjoy the thrill of pursuit that came from the previous games you will be disappointed with this game, but the car customisation makes up for it a little, if you dig that sort of thing.