Review: The Fast And Furious: Showdown

Become a Part of the crew! Strap in and get ready for an intense ride as you team up to take down a dangerous international gang that can only be stopped by you and the rest of the Fast & Furious crew. Get behind the wheel of some of the world’s most intense rides and take on high-stakes driving missions cooperatively with a friend or…

Pros:

• Has full co op for all story missions and in the challenges menu.
• Co op is drop in and drop out.
• Uses the same method as Burnout to earn XP. Drive on the wrong side of the road, drifting etc.
• XP unlocks new cars, decals, paints and mods for your vehicles.
• Secondary objectives are optional and completing them earns extra XP.
• Varied missions from racing to heists to courier missions. Every so often you will do missions where you will have your passenger hanging out of the window shooting bad guys.
• On most missions you can swap drivers on the fly even in co op.
• Unlock film stills from the latest Fast and Furious film.
• Online leaderboards with more emphasis on friends leaderboards.
• Story is loosely based off the film. It kind of fills in the gaps from the movie and in no way is a spoiler for the film.
• Challenge mode is basically a set of mini games with their own rank/reward system.
• Full statistics screen detailing everything you do in the game.
• Mods are used to improve the overall performance of your car, Matching certain mods with another give them better performance overall.

Cons:

• Really basic PS2 looking graphics with blocky character models. 
• Poor basic looking menu setup, Theres just no style or effort in them. They look basic and cold on the eyes.
• Pop up and juddering occur at high speed and in a racing game that happens a lot.
• Unofficial voice actors and the dialogue/script is terrible.
• Co-op is local only.
• Music is repetitive and annoying.
• Handling is loose and drifting is terrible.
• No decent sign posting in the game and heist missions dont have clear indicators of your target.
• FMV’s look poor with character models looking like robots with Thunderbirds style mouth movement.
• No indication of secondary objectives or that they even exist in game.
• Your character will say annoying things like “My bad” or “Sorry” everytime you hit a wall, car or your team mate. And I mean everytime!
• The heist missions basically consist of driving upto the target then a QTE will take over and kill any immersion you may have built up.
• Levels have a short intro, whether it be a conversation or a scan of the land. This is unskippable even after a restart.
• When you neutralize an enemy the camera slows down and attempts to pan on the taken down car. What this does to the player is slow the game down and give the AI a advantage as your gun will or car will usually be facing the wrong way after.
• The notification for completing a secondary objective pops up on screen and fills the top half of your viewing window. Usually resulting in you having a crash.
• All engine noises are generic and if its one thing this game needed, Is to keep the engine noises authentic. The movies make a huge point on engine noise where as in this game its almost like an after thought.
• Again going against all things Fast and Furious, The dials are all small and minimal. The map is pointless where as the speedo is just a set of numbers in the corner.
• The story missions fill in parts from the film but in the game this causes no mission flow. One minute you will be having a street race in Rio, Next you will be in an Army APC shooting police.
• When you unlock mods, Its basically their way of saying you need them for the next level. Issue being you cant assign new mods or change your paint until you quit out of story and reload the level.

In Summary, The game is terrible and not worth playing at any price. Well maybe a fiver and you can at least see how bad it is. As games begin to peak on the current gen consoles, This type of blatent cash in is not acceptable. There is no fun to be had in the game, Not even for a minute. I hoped it would have something good but left bitterly dissapointed. The only real challenge in the game is to see how far you can get until you either lose the will to game or your TV gets a controller in its face. It does give up a load of trophies easily so for a cheap price a trophy/achievement hoarder could snag a few cheap ones. Other than that don’t do it to yourself.