Street Racers vs Police

Pros

• There's not enough pursuit games on the market, and this one fits the bill well.
• Nice graphics. Not the shiniest, but pretty good. Early PS3 or late PS2 graphics.
• Pretty good car selection for a free game.

Cons

• The AI isn't all that smart.
• We could use a few more cars and customization options. For a game about people who can afford to outrun the cops on a regular basis, you don't get too many extra vehicles.

From Play Publishing comes Street Challenge: Racers vs Police, a game that hit the market in March of 2012. Detailing an ongoing struggle and suspense element of street racing while avoiding police capture, Racers vs Police follows an awesome sub-genre that includes Need for Speed: Underground.

While it may not stand up to many other retail 2012 games, this free addition to the street racing and police evasion movement is certainly a nice treat to play over a weekend. If you're tired of going out to actual street races and having cops waste your time with silly things like citations and arrests, choose your car and get to the streets with this game.

The file size isn't at all what I expected for the game. While it isn't exactly the hardest hitting racing with the best graphics or a deep soundtrack, the performance is pretty nice for the file size.

It isn't too demanding on a computer, but you should at least have a 1GB GDDR3 or GDDR5 video card. A 2.8 Ghz processor is the minimum for CPU.

You can get away with playing the game with less, but for baseline smoothness, get a video card. It simply makes things easier. The system requirements aren't too difficult to obtain, so you may want to track down a gutted quad core computer (rebuilding an old Dell or HP if you can't afford a custom rig is perfectly fine) in order to step up to a newer generation. Keep this away from single core XP machines.

The actual game play is fairly fun, though I wish that the cops were a little more aggressive on the game tracks. They can eventually catch up to you, but they don't seem to be trying to be creative to stop you. It's as if there's a law stating they they catch up, it's magically over.

The basic elements of pursuit game play are still there, however. You need to not only defeat rival racers, but stay ahead of the police. With those two hovering goals, you have a little more to worry about than just being the fastest. A bit more could be done to push the feeling, such as having a lot more precincts to spawn different officers with different tactics.

What the game has on its own is perfectly fine. It's not innovative, but if you've never played pursuit games past the year 2000, this is a good, free and legal way to start. While not all of us care about legal, with bandwidth throttling from Internet service providers, it's worth being a bit more careful.

Pros

• There's not enough pursuit games on the market, and this one fits the bill well.
• Nice graphics. Not the shiniest, but pretty good. Early PS3 or late PS2 graphics.
• Pretty good car selection for a free game.

Cons

• The AI isn't all that smart.
• We could use a few more cars and customization options. For a game about people who can afford to outrun the cops on a regular basis, you don't get too many extra vehicles.