NASCAR Heat 5

There are two locations in which NASCAR happens. On the track and off it. NASCAR Heat 5 does well to acknowledge this, but only manages a mid table finish in both areas.

At its best, the gameplay of NH5 is a lot of fun. Going full speed at Talladega, battling it out before slingshotting past a rival in order to take first place, will always be great. It's an almost F-Zero-esque feeling of piloting a big chunk of metal at speeds in which you should barely be able to control it. But you do, and you're rewarded for it.

The structure of races does a very good job in helping you understand how impressive that is, a task that can be difficult in motorsports games in general. Unless you go in to the settings and change it, the races will have three phases: Practice, qualifying and the race itself. In practice, you have as much time as you want (up to one hour!) to just run laps, trying to find the best possible line for the fastest lap time. You'll be given a time to beat, that will later be used as a target for the qualifying lap. However, it isn't until you're thrown into the real race that the brilliance of this structure is made evident to you. Racing with a full field is nothing like putting down lap times on your own, Suddenly you're being tackled, blocked and pulled constantly, and any sense of mastery from practice may be lost. This is fun, frantic, and requires great concentration. It's NASCAR at its best, and it makes for a great video game.

Broadly speaking, there are two directions for motorsport games to go; arcade and simulation. Do you recreate the mechanical and physical feel of the racing or do you translate the culture and vibe of it into something more digestible for the average fan? This is obviously a bit of a false dichotomy, but bear with me.

In this choice, NH5 is burdened both by the current state of the sport itself, and the much more abstract question; what is the culture of NASCAR?

NASCAR as it is today, is a very different sport from even 20 years ago. In the process of making it safer, the cars, and thus the strategies for racing them, have changed a lot. Translating the racing of today is a bit like translating a different sport from what you would have done a few years ago. This is particularly obvious on the super speedways, where you'll have to stay in the drafting lines to have the slightest chance of keeping up with the pack. Make a mistake and you can easily finish last.

Similar to how the changes to the sport split fans, this style of gameplay is likely to split players too. While this can create moments where patience and strategy can be greatly rewarded, it can also feel unnecessarily punishing or even a bit dull – particularly if you're racing online. This is where the arcade/simulation division becomes relevant. In replicating the style of racing, NH5 serves as a strategic simulation of the sport. But in controlling the cars themselves, the approach is much more arcade-like, requiring fewer active inputs from the player. This can lead to the time spent "in line" feeling much more uninvolved than it could (and maybe should).

Despite NH5 having a decently fun career mode, it is easy to criticize the game for how seldom it meaningfully portrays the action off track. The relationship system that tracks your standing with other racers is an acknowledgement that the narratives around the drivers matter to fans, which is why it is so disappointing that I never noticed it at all during races. There was for example one driver who really hated my guts, according to the game, but I could never figure out which if the cars she was in.

The "culture" of NASCAR, to me, is something so distinctly and commercially American, possibly even more so than NFL or Baseball, that the refusal to acknowledge it is confusing. Watching it is an almost parody like, cyberpunk esque bombardment of advertisements, heavily sprinkled with patriotic displays, that the game never rally gestures towards. Of course the cars themselves are all plastered with logos, but that's about it. There is no (extremely forced) national anthem or military or church presence. No commentators even, long since a staple of sports games. Most damning of all – not a single voice to utter the legendary words;

Drivers, start your engines!

I've had a lot of fun playing NH5, both online and offline. But it's been a shallow experience, ultimately far removed from the experiences I've had watching the sport.