Need for Speed 5 Porsche Unleashed PC Game

Need for Speed 5 Porsche Unleashed possesses one of the worst collision-detection routines ever seen in a racing game. Need for Spee...

Need for Speed 5 Porsche Unleashed possesses one of the worst collision-detection routines ever seen in a racing game. Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed strays from several conventions previously established by the popular arcade-style exotic-car racing series. For one thing, like its name suggests, Porsche Unleashed features automobiles exclusively from one manufacturer. What’s more, the game has a more detailed, more realistic driving and physics model than its predecessors, though the game’s realism is scalable. And while Porsche Unleashed has a few minor shortcomings, it nevertheless stands as the most ambitious game in the series since the original. As such, it’ll more than likely make you love the Porsche on the off chance you don’t already.

Porsche Unleashed looks good enough to do justice to its prestigious German sponsor. The game includes many dozens of different Porsche models from the manufacturer’s 50-year product line, and each one bears the unmistakable curvature of a Porsche. The 3D car models are highly detailed: The cars all have working turn signals, brake lights, and headlights, and when you look at them in the garage, you can even check the engine under the hood, pop the trunk, or view the car’s interior. The cars shine in the sunlight and reflect street lamps at nighttime, and they can also get noticeably damaged. You can clearly see their independent suspension at work as they corner, thanks to the game’s realistic four-point physics model, and you can even see their drivers turning the wheel and shifting gears. You can drive the cars from a 3D cockpit view, from which you get a great sense of speed, but the cockpit view’s limited visibility and slower frame rate – as well as the muffled engine noise – make the cutaway first-person view preferable, though you can also select from two external perspectives. The cars in Porsche Unleashed don’t look totally perfect, as some of the minor details such as the door handles are part of the texture maps, rather than part of the polygonal geometry. But such details are only evident if you spend a lot of time gawking at your cars in the garage, rather than racing them out on the streets of Europe.