My first experience with Street Racing Syndicate was browsing through a local Big Lots closeout store right after graduating from high school. By this time, PC games were making the migration to cloud-based, and ultimately, PC games were the first to really go digital and drop the physical copies.

It was also a really weird/confusing time for games that were hosted on platforms like Steam. Primarily because you would purchase a physical game at a store with a CD/DVD inside, and they would also provide a Steam license for the game, for digital download. What was worse was that you would need to activate the game on Steam with the license in the package. So many people would purchase the physical copy game, use the CD to install it, activate it to their Steam account, and now the CDs/DVDs couldn’t be transferred because the licenses were tied to that person’s Steam account. Thus leaving thousands upon thousands of games purchased in the last 2000s completely useless and resold to unaware purchasers.

Anyways, I remember seeing SRS in a cardboard mid-box case on the shelves between opera music compilation CDs, box sets of Bonanza on DVD series, etc. I never purchased the game; however, I do remember it sitting on those shelves with a big ol’ orange price sticker smacked on the front of it.

That's actually pretty simple. By the time SRS had hit the discount shelves, Need for Speed: Most Wanted had dropped in the same year. NFS Underground 2 was the year prior, and soon NFS Carbon was released in 2006. Basically, NFS was king. Every LAN center I'd go to during the late 2000s had bright flashes of underbody neon radiating from the LCD monitors of gamers playing one of the champions in the NFS series. To be honest, EA was on point at that time in their lives. Need For Speed Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted, and Carbon were all solid hits. The customization, free-roaming, graphics, controls, etc. were easy to learn, fun, and overall quite popular among PC gamers. There really wasn't a reason to jump ship to a third-party street racer.

However, over time, I collected digital bundles, and in one of them, it must have slipped in because here we are, reviewing Street Racing Syndicate developed by Eutechnyx and published by Funbox Media Ltd.; apparently Namco is involved in here somewhere too.

As for the Steam Store description:

Start your engines, let’s review.

Ah, a DirectX 9.0b compatible video card. This was before they even specified the particular video cards they preferred. Do you remember those days? When they would list every single GPU that a game recommended? Even to this day, if you look on Steam, they still mention which series of GPUs are compatible.

Obviously, for a game released in 2005 (correction, Steam says 2004; however, in the game they say 2004), graphics can go one of two ways.

Surprisingly, it worked fine. I was immediately greeted by a swarm of women biting their fingertips, bending over in every pose, and essentially replicating Fast and Furious in any way possible. Video options were pretty plentiful; however, widescreen was not an option. I could do 1920, but it was 1920 x 2400 or something along those lines. By default, it put everything on high; however, it also put the resolution at 640 x 480.

After a couple of cutscenes with literal crickets chirping in the background, I was in my first race. My first immediate thought was…

This is a car parts advertisement. That’s it. There were signs for KONIG, BF Goodrich, etc. When I say signs, there were hundreds, among hundreds, among hundreds. They were all relatively the same, and around every corner was the same sign. Couldn’t they get more sponsors? Perhaps mix up the designs? Why are there sponsors around illegal activities? Who is setting up these signs/billboards around cities before illegal races take place?

To be honest, the game works fine. I was able to tab out and take notes, changing settings was easy, and the water effect on the road looked nice. This game is an arcade racer. Plain and simple. There are a lot of parts taken from the NFS series, such as starting out with a sweet ride, then having to buy a subpar ride and tune it up. It’s a similar experience to how every Pokémon game starts with leaving your mom.

In the end, SRS isn’t a bad-looking game and runs fine on newer PCs.

I remember the NFS games being soundtrack blasters, with some really great hits thrown in as you drift around corners. As with every game from the mid-2000s, SRS has strong POD/Limp Bizkit vibes.

The menu sound effects are obnoxious; however, they sound right at home if you were sitting in a sit-down arcade machine at Chuck E. Cheese's. Granted, this game has ties to Namco (Pac-Man), so it makes sense. The voiceovers are terrible; the only people that move their mouths are in the cutscenes, and that's very grainy. However, you don't really play these games for the people.

Ultimately, the audio is fine. It has licensed tracks that wouldn't be acceptable on YouTube, which makes me much more grateful that I am using Notion instead of YouTube for the Never Ending Backlog.

Arrow keys and spacebar (technically, if you do manual/semi-manual, you will use D and A to shift gears, and Shift to initiate the clutch). That’s it, just like every other racing game from this era. It’s not difficult to learn. The mouse controls the menus, though you can use the keyboard instead as well. Nothing to write home about here; they don’t seem too sluggish, but it feels like an arcade racer. You won’t find depth in this game. I would say NFS seems tighter on the controls, so that probably says something.

As mentioned, it’s the same plot as every street racing game/movie/series, etc. follows. Someone needs help, you help them in a tricked-out ride, getting you to bite the hook that there are cool cars in this game that you can eventually earn. You smoke the competition, then you earn money and buy an unoptimized Toyota Camry in beige. Then you work your way back up, tuning the car, driving around the city, participating in sanctioned illegal races, and do what every single teenager did with these games.

Should I put the money into the engine… or turquoise underbody neon…?

Don’t judge me.

I do find it funny that they put underbody neon under a performance upgrade instead of a cosmetic upgrade. I mean, there is a full section dedicated to cosmetics (stickers, painting, etc.), but no, neon is a performance upgrade.

I cannot imagine what the licensing cost of this game would be. It had licensed songs, licensed car brands, licensed part manufacturers, etc. I mean, holy cow, they could have spent way less and done something a little more generic and been just fine; however, clearly they did it, but I can’t imagine it was easy on the game development budget. When I say this game has more in-game advertisements than Transformers had GM products, that says something.

Street Racing Syndicate is actually a fine game. It’s $2.99 on Steam (that’s not on sale, that’s the actual price). If you have an older PC that you’re looking for classic games, then I probably recommend it. Primarily because the earliest NFS game that you can purchase on Steam is NFS: Shift, which came out in 2009, and that game was garbage. I will say that beyond the massive licensing deals, there are a few accuracies in the details. You can actually buy many of the specific parts that you put into your digital car in real life for a real car. Not sure if the spec increases are correct; however, I have a slight car interest, and some of the parts I purchased years back are actually in this game, which is nice. It’s not just an ELECTRONIC UPGRADE #1; it actually says what the product is and uses actual images of the item. Is it necessary? No. Is it going to capture the right audience? Probably not. But it’s neat.