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DUB does everything you'd expect a racing game these days to do. It moves fast, featured an abundant of familiar cars, tons of challenging tracks, a few aerial elements and it good looks to boot. Most of the cars handle the same depending on the type of car, and the racing seems balanced overall. The AI will pick cars of equal abilities to match yours, so you can forget about situations like racing a Class A versus a Class D. I am still kinda bothered that there's the STi is available, and that the Skyline is a Class C car, but that's just me and it's a bit off-topic. The AI does have a tendency to cheat, but I discovered that if you tail them a bit, you'll eventually pick up all the shortcuts and will never have a problem in future races.
Graphically DUB pushes hard and shows well. The game keeps a consistent framerate in dry stages - I only noticed sluggishness in the rainy/snowy stages. Maybe that was supposed to be a feature? I'm not sure. It felt like I was riding a 3-legged turtle in a snowstorm though. No pop-up, no horizon fog...everything is well-drawn and textured. The car models look great and the particle effects really pop. Everything moved too fast for me to really take time to look, but what I did see was really impressive.
If you choose to listen to the games soundtrack, you'll be treated to some nice trance and drum-n-bass, plus a couple of good hip-hop tracks. I suggest a custom soundtrack though, since there's nothing quite like ripping around to Benny Benassi's "Able To Love", especially if you've got a nice sound system. The car sound effects are almost perfect; very rich and authentic sounding. From the chirp of the blow-off valve to the whistle of the intake, it sounds like racing folks.
After taking my 135th corner at speed, I decided to give DUB a break, and strangely have not felt the need since. I'm guessing this is what's called "replay value", and I can't see much of it here in the single player. Unfortunately at the time of writing this, my Xbox Live account is in question, so I wasn't able to take my game online. I'm guessing that's where all the fun is.
Overall DUB is fun, even if it does exist solely to suck up our hard-earned coinage. It's entertaining, impressively fast, mildly challenging and rather painless to pick up. It does well as a racing game, but exceeds nowhere else. Maybe next time Rockstar will spend less money on licensing and a bit more on development. Until then, the definitive title for the console racing king is still up for grabs.
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