While it is cool that there are so many customization possibilities, the actual mechanics of the game suffer. Firstly, the career mode becomes boring quickly. For most of the first dozen or so competitions, there are only the first three mundane tracks from which to choose. These tracks are really not that exciting, and truthfully there are few fundamental differences between them, so you'll spend most of your first hours of Juiced playing through what feels like the exact same thing.

The next major problem is that there is not a really great sense of speed in Juiced. The game has very little gradual speed adjustment. For example, when your speedometer reads 20 m.p.h, it feels almost identical to when it reads 40 m.p.h. However, at 60 m.p.h., you notice the speed distance, but even then, it does not really seem like you're going fast enough. The environments are a factor in this as well. They get really repetitive and there are a lot of turns involved, so that thrill of racing at high speeds does not come across well at all. Also, the scenery in the game is really just unwelcome in today's world of gaming. The environments are completely stale, they don't move, and they just look archaic by today's standards. There is also not enough variety in the individual courses. A lot of the scenery is recycled throughout the track.

There is also almost no sense of damage done to your car. You can hit a building head-on at 75 m.p.h., and the front of your car will remain unchanged. This makes it even more peculiar that you have to "repair" your car after every race before you can make any other changes to it. It really just impedes any kind of realism that Juiced was going for.

If you can stand these problems in career mode, then along the way, you will earn "respect points" for recognition of such skills as great control, good speed and even impressive betting. As you gain respect points, you will hear from different characters who would like to join your crew. Once you have a crew and multiple cars, you can participate in a "team race". This mode is lackluster, as it only involves setting an "aggression level" for each of your team members and watching the match virtually as a spectator. Your team members are AI-controlled characters, and you are left out of it. I'm not sure what the appeal of this mode is, but I have better things to do than just watch a bunch of cars run at relatively slow speeds on my computer screen.

Although most of career mode is just based on street racing, there is another kind of competition that tries to give the game a little more flare. "Show offs", as they're called, are just about performing cool tricks with your car and trying to rake up the most points based on how well you execute them. For example, turning your car 180 degrees and then performing a "donut" is the kind of stuff you do in a show off competition.

There is a long set of tutorial videos that you can watch to learn how to perform each trick. Unfortunately, these tricks sometimes really require a lot of track space, and the environments in Juiced are quite narrow for the most part. The list of tricks is also really short and feels very stale. "Show off" matches just feel awkwardly out of place in this game and don't make up for the faults in normal races. The main point of this game is to compete in races, not to see how many times you can spin your car in a circle.