Each territory has a minimum of two and a maximum of four races. If you win a majority of the races in a given territory, you can make it your own. Once you do so, however, you'll have to defend it from rival gangs if you want to maintain control.

As the police turn up the heat, the battle ultimately shifts to Carbon Canyon. There your goal is to defeat crew leaders in life-or-death races in Carbon Canyon. You get to build your crew with strategic choices and then use their skills on the road and in the garage to help you dominate races. At any time, you can use two of your crew members.

The game's graphics are excellent. Set almost entirely at night, Need for Speed Carbon has some excellent lighting effects. I love the headlight effects and neon sheen. The cars look awesome, as well. Even the roads are realistic -- cracked and often bumpy.

Need for Speed Carbon has a new Autosculpt Car tool that lets you customize your vehicle to your heart's content. Naturally, you can change colors, adds stripes, etc. But just as important, you can upgrade your engine, transmission, suspension, tires and more to suite your particular driving style (do you prefer rear or front brakes? early turbo boosts or later ones?).

You can align with the Tuner, American Muscle, or Exotic car classes. A physics model makes each class handle and drive differently. You can race new and old cars like the Aston Martin DB9, Chevrolet Camaro SS, Ford GT, Jaguar XK, McLaren SLR, Porsche Cayman, and more.

My favorite parts of the game are the Canyon Duel and Drift race modes. The former has two parts. First you chase your opponents downhill and try to stay as close as possible. In the second part, you're in front and try to stay as far ahead of the tailgaters as possible -- without crashing through a barrier and plummeting to your death. The Drift race mode is even harder to complete and will offer a real challenge even to racing game veterans. The trick for drifting is to maintain high speeds, while keeping your tires in the bonus zones as you drift around the corners. 

The gameplay of Need for Speed Carbon is pretty basic: drive fast and furious! It's not too hard overall to master, even using a keyboard and mouse. A little more complexity would have been nice. But, overall, this is a good-looking racing game that plays well.

Also note that EA is making the title available by way of Transgaming Technologies Cider engine. TransGaming’s Cider engine allows publishers to extend their products to Mac users without having to recode or recompile their Windows-based software. That will help speed up the arrival of games to the Mac. However, games transported using the Cider engine will only run on Intel-based Macs. PowerPC systems need not apply.

Need for Speed Carbon has an ESRB content rating of "E10"+ for "Everyone 10 and older. System requirements are: Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later; an 1.83GHz or faster Intel Core Duo processor; 1GB of RAM; 16GB free hard-disk space; an ATI X1600 series or later or NVIDIA GeForce 7300 or later video card; and an 8x or faster DVD-ROM drive.

Macsimum rating: 7.5 out of 10