Need for Speed: High Stakes

About Need for Speed: High Stakes

Need for Speed: High Stakes (1999), Road Challenge in Europe, is EA's fourth Need for Speed, which added car damage, a career economy and a mode in which players can lose their cars.

Need for Speed: High Stakes in Depth

Players race exotic cars on tracks across North America and Europe, alone against computer opponents or two at a time in split screen. Cars are grouped by class, from affordable performance models such as the BMW Z3 and Chevrolet Camaro to exotics such as the Ferrari F50 and McLaren F1. More realistic than its predecessors, it introduced a damage system in which collisions affect a car's appearance and performance, and economy-based tournaments whose cash prizes pay for repairs, new cars and upgrades for later races.

The Hot Pursuit mode from Need for Speed III was expanded with more options, including letting players drive the police trying to stop racers. The title was chosen to convey risk and consequence, embodied in High Stakes mode, where a player can lose a saved car, and the money spent upgrading it, in a race. Because its cars were licensed, Electronic Arts had to persuade manufacturers to let them be damaged, and it marked the return of the Porsche licence, absent from racing games since 1997's Porsche Challenge. Critics, who occasionally compared it with Gran Turismo, praised its graphics, AI and realism but criticised its inconsistent frame rate.

Making Need for Speed: High Stakes

EA Canada, with EA Seattle, developed it as the follow-up to Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, and Electronic Arts published it for the PlayStation and Windows in 1999. It received "generally favorable reviews" according to Metacritic, IGN remarking that it refined the series' formula while introducing new features.