Game Informer Magazine

NASCAR isn’t about going around in circles. It’s about survival.

Try racing at almost 200 mph with 42 other hot shots for 300 laps. You’re bumper-to-bumper and door-to-door with them the whole race; and each driver is perfectly willing to put you into the wall if it means that you’re out of their way.

In this death-defying spectacle, sometimes you’ve got to call on help from a friend. That’s when you look for your teammates on the track. See if he wants to draft with you or if he could block the traffic coming up behind you. Then again, the word “friend” in NASCAR is always temporary. With 10 laps to go, it’s every man for himself.

This seemingly odd mix of competition and cooperation is a huge part of the sport. In his last moments before the crash that took his life, it has been said that Dale Earnhardt was blocking a pack of cars at Daytona so his son Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Junior’s teammate Michael Waltrip could race ahead and duke it out to the finish.

After having introduced a friends-and-enemies system in the past, this year the team at Tiburon is going one step further with teammates. There eight commands you can issue for a teammate to respond to, such as to pit together or to ask them to move to the side to make way for you. The feature even extends to the research and development for your cars. Want to have a dominant program like Hendrick Motorsports or Roush Racing? Then play nice and get along with your teammates on and off the track. Otherwise you might ask for drafting help and end up being left high and dry as the field railroads past you.

The game lets you switch at any time to a teammate’s car, which could be very useful if you want to drive up a car to help you when there are no friends around. Or should you fall back in the pack or crash, you could grab victory with a different driver. This may not feel as good as winning with your own guy, but the game will reward you for fulfilling team objectives.

A voice-recognition headset can be used to issue the on-track commands (including some that can only be accessed with a headset), but we suggest you do this when nobody’s around ro risk getting caught acting like a dork. “Fight to the Top” mode also embraces the team concept by letting you join famous teams, and even own them.

It’s easy to think of the NASCAR franchise as literally going around in circles year in and year out, but over the past few installments the team at Tiburon has actually tried to imbue some AI into the other cars.

Other games brag about how many real-life cars they’ve got, but then driving around the track is like being a ghost town – it’s just you and a bunch of hunks of metal. Hopefully, Tiburon can implement the AI for your teammates, as well as your other friends and enemies on the track, skillfully enough to really make it about the drivers and not the cars. After all, that – and sheer survival – is what NASCAR is all about.