Picking right up where Need for Speed: Most Wanted's story left off, Need for Speed Carbon has you racing in a new town vying for street racing supremacy as you have become indebted to a buddy for saving your behind from bounty hunter, Sgt. Cross who totalled your fly ride in the process of trying to capture you.

Carbon also introduces "team racing," where you can have members of your "crew" (gang, posse, homeboys, chess club, what-have-you) participate in races to gain certain advantages, depending on each buddy's skill set. Some will pose as scouts to alert you to any upcoming shortcut, some will run interference and try and spin out your opponent and also act as drafters for you to tuck in behind and the sling-shot your way back up to your adversary.

It looks great (but you'd expect that on the Xbox 360, naturally), and has a sound storyline. However, gameplay itself, the whole racing bit, is nothing new to anyone who has played any of the previous games in the NFS series. Sure, the police chases have been cut down to emphasise storyline, and the city streets have been traded for canyon roads (which is meant to add tension but really only adds frustration as the aforementioned helper crew will sometimes "help" you right off a cliff... "with friends like these...").

Still, when all is said and done, fans of the Need For Speed series will be pleasantly rewarded with a solid continuation of the NFS story while newcomers to the series will have a ton of whiz-bang racing to wow them before it gets old-hat. It doesn't provide the same racing thrills as an exacting and exhaustively accurate racing simulator, but Carbon, like its predecessors, does provide good ol' fashion arcade action on wheels and some decent variations on that theme, which is pretty cool in the long run.