

The racing in Fast & Furious is smooth and slick. During these scenes, you are actually not driving your car you are just reacting to events. In these white-knuckle events, you must not only hit your shifter at just the right time to keep ahead of the pack, but you must also tap on-screen prompts as they flash to avoid slamming into tunnel walls and pillars. In addition to traditional races, Fast & Furious revisits the drag races of the previous game (hit the stick shift at just the right time) and refashions them into tunnel chases. Fast & Furious features still straight from the movie. Maybe you want the pure brute force of a muscle car here. An import tuner may be fantastic for ripping through a drift race, but not necessarily ideal on a road rally. Since all of the cars have different strengths, such as speed or handling, they are useful for tackling the different events.

You must grow your stable of cars by putting pink slips on the line. Fast & Furious borrows the "pink slip" mechanic of the previous game. This is where expanding your garage becomes so critical. These different events often recycle real estate, so you will have to approach each stage in distinctly different ways to win. The game offers a series of different racing events, such as evasion races, tunnel runs, straight races, and GPS checkpoint rallies. Once you have these essentials down, you're pretty much all set for playing Fast & Furious. Tapping the screen hits the brakes and touching an on-screen NOS canister engages the nitrous. The game utilizes auto-accelerate, a hold-over from traditional mobile. It's a fast sequence designed to give you a basic introduction to the controls and mechanics. You must glance off the side of these tanks to break them free of the semi. As Diesel, you roar up next to a semi truck pulling three huge gas tankers. The game begins with the very first scene of the film. The main thrust of the movie is revenge and the rebuilding of trust between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, who are still very much at odds with each other despite the ending of the first movie. Because Fast & Furious debuts in theaters today, I'm not going to dig too deep into the story and its surprises.
