The Need for Speed series has been around forever, but in the last few years it has evolved to embody illegal street racing, culminating in this latest iteration: Carbon. While Gran Turismo and Project Gotham push the boundaries of realism, other games like Ridge Racer shoot for an almost absurdly unrealistic arcade style. Need for Speed Carbon straddles the center line with skill and precision, earning fans on both sides of the fence. If you fall into the "loves Need for Speed" category like I do, you shouldn’t be surprised that, while a satisfying racer, Carbon doesn’t make any titanic strides forward.

Some of this undoubtedly comes from EA’s habit of playing it safe with their upper echelon titles, and who can blame them? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? And while this leads to only minor innovations on a per game basis, it also means that you can always count on getting the same great experience from the series you’ve come to know and love. In the case of Need for Speed Carbon, this rule holds stubbornly in place -- you get a proven illegal street-racing game with a couple of newfangled doodads to play with.

Dances with Wolves

The most obvious of these semi-subtle improvements ("semi-subtle" meaning that they don’t have a huge impact on the actual play experience, but EA likes to talk about them a lot) is the addition of your racing crew. As you earn respect and cash, you can hire (and fire) other racers with specific abilities, some of which are more helpful than others.

Your crew members serve as wingmen (or wingpeople, because some of them are female) during races and cruise along with you, waiting for your cue to do whatever it is they do. They’re broken up into different specialties, like Blockers that take out rival racers by crashing into them, Scouts that seek out hidden shortcuts, and Drafters that boost ahead and in turn give you a boost by letting you ride their jetwash. Members of your crew also have special skills that are useful when you’re not racing, like Fabricators that unlock the Autosculpt feature, and Fixers that grease the palms of the local police.

In practice, these guys are not as useful as I might have liked since they typically need to be in front of you in order to do any good. Blockers are probably the most useless as they sometimes can’t catch up to the opponent you need blocked (I’m looking at you, Neville, you slow bastard), but they can help out a little by plowing into cars trailing just behind to widen your lead. I found the Scouts to be the most helpful, but their shortcuts occasionally end up being more trouble than they’re worth as the alleyways they led me down were typically tough to navigate and filled with speed-sapping trash cans and patio furniture.

Of course, your crew also keeps you posted on what’s happening in the race, so if you’ve got a speedy contender looking to pass on your right, they’ll give you a heads-up. In practice, this means you’ll want to assemble a crew of people whose voices don’t annoy the crap out of you (again, staring directly at Neville, you whiny punk), because you’re going to hear a lot of concerned shouts during the course of a given race.

Large and in Charge

The other big deal about Need for Speed Carbon is the way you progress through the game by conquering the territory of rival crews and build your standing as one of the racing elite. While the open-world city of past Need for Speeds is still in full effect, the city itself has been divided up into chunks owned by other racing crews. In order to seize power over these chunks (and reap the sweet benefits they provide), you have to beat the current clan of illegal street racers that holds them. Every time you take a chunk, you get a reward in the form of some kind of unlockable upgrade, like new body kits or a more efficient engine.

Which area of the city you start in is determined by the kind of car you want to drive: Muscle car fanatics start in Kempton, those with a passion for Exotics start in Fortuna, and my brothers hot for Tuners start in Downtown. Each of these starting areas is cut up into smaller zones that you’ll need to win a few races in so that you can capture the zone and, eventually, the entire area. Kempton, Fortuna and Downtown each have a boss that controls the whole area, whom you’ll need to beat in a canyon race in order to gain total dominance.

Living on the Edge

This brings me to the next big innovation in Need for Speed Carbon, called the Canyon Race. The idea is that you race down a narrow, curve-saturated mountain road at obscene speeds in a duel with a crew boss. You have to race down the canyon twice -- once as the follower, where you chase the boss’s tail and try to stay as close to him as possible (or even pass him if you can), and once as the leader, where you try to dust the boss who’s hot on your tail. The twist? Go over the edge, and you have to start all over again.

While the Canyon Races were definitely frustrating, they were also white-knuckle ordeals that severely ratcheted up the tension. They provide a nice counterpoint to all the neon glare of the city and don’t really have the opportunity to get old since they’re pretty few and far between. It’s clear that EA wanted to use these races as rare and terrifying events to spice up the gameplay and keep things from getting too stagnant, and in my experience, they were very successful in that regard.

See, constantly jumping from race to race and owning every opponent does get a little boring after a while, so it’s cool that you get these Canyon Races to break up the action now and then. The high stakes and tough competition are a welcome diversion from the race-upgrade-race-upgrade pattern that previous Need for Speed games degenerated into. Plus, the mountain setting is graphically stunning in high definition, yet still holds up in standard definition.

The Fastest and the Furiousest

Taking Need for Speed Carbon online was seriously lame, but it really wasn’t the game’s fault. The problem is that there’s nobody on PlayStation Network to play against right now, but that should change as more people acquire PS3s. Still, without any sort of user feedback system, the handful of races I was able to run almost always ended in either a loss or the other player yanking their network cable out of the wall just before my victory. Of course, none of these issues have much to do with Carbon itself, but I have to mention them because they impact the play experience in a horrible way. It’s not Need for Speed Carbon’s fault, but the bottom line is that, at least for now, the game isn’t fun to play online over the PlayStation Network.

There is promise there, however. The online exclusive races look like they could be a blast if you could get more than two people in a race. Pursuit Tag puts one racer in the shoes of the Five-O and it’s their job to hassle the other racers and generally try to slow them down or get them to wreck. If they succeed in taking a racer out, the fallen racer becomes the cop and the cycle begins anew. Pursuit Knockout is similar, except that it takes the lap knockout formula and, instead of removing cars that don’t make the cut each lap, Carbon turns them into cops who get to take out their pent-up aggressions on the remaining racers. These game modes certainly sound fun in theory, and probably will be once more people are playing, but right now there are just not enough people to bring the pain to over PlayStation Network, so you’re better off just racing friends in split-screen.

Win, Place or Show

By and large, Need for Speed Carbon is a satisfying racing game. It’s nothing terribly groundbreaking, but it does introduce some new features to jazz up the genre. Ultimately, it’s extremely similar to the last few titles in the Need for Speed series, so if you’re a fan, you’re in luck. The music in this version is probably some of the best of the entire series (I nearly freaked out completely when I heard the Lady Sovereign track kick in), bending and shaping your aftermarket parts using Autosculpt is suitably amusing, and the stylized, high-contrast cutscenes have a cool feel to them. There’s not much here to differentiate the PS3 version from current-gen consoles besides the sweet high-resolution graphics (and in the case of the Xbox 360, not even that), but if you have a PS3, there are worse games you could play on it.