Need for Speed: Heat - The First Few Hours (Version tested: Playstation 4 Pro)

Black Friday sales are at least useful for picking up games that had been on my radar for a while but never seemingly justified paying full price for, and pretty much every single latter iteration of the Need for Speed series falls directly into that bracket. I love arcade racing games, I hate track racing games like Forza and Gran Turismo (honestly, there's no better cure for insomnia) but the NFS series has always fallen just short of greatness. 

Ghost studios are once again front and centre for development props, and it looks like they've poured on a lot of visual flare and splendour, perhaps finally getting to grips with the rusting innards of the Playstation 4 Pro, wringing out of it a game that looks rather nice, and actually doesn't drop frames every 5 seconds like previous efforts. 

I was prepared to write a snotty review for this, purely on the basis of the game starting off by defaulting to offering you online play over solo play. WHAT? Play with other...filthy...humans on the internet? Are you INSANE EA? So rapid button-pushers like me might not enjoy the annoyance of having to wait till the multiplayer game loads to quit out and go back in solo. Just a thought but in every other game I've ever played with an online / offline portion, the default has been solo so yes, I'm a bit miffed. 

Once you're in you do the usual NFS stuff of setting out to prove your greatness as a rookie driver. This time round, rather than "Payback" style B-Movie characters you get to choose your own (and yes, you can even change their look later on in your home garage, lovely!) and of course you get to choose your first ride. It doesn't matter what you choose, your initial experience may be disappointing and you'll probably curse Ghost Studios from the rooftops because the car handling is...well, like a 1970s Morris Marina trying to take a corner without whaling itself to death. Worse still, early on the drift mechanic in the game is appalling at first (all important and for me pretty much the defining thing that'll tell me whether I'm going to enjoy my time with an arcade racer or not - and in my opinion never bettered from the Project Gotham series on Xbox). Trying to pull off an exquisite cornering move will normally throw you straight into a fence, or a ditch, or worse, an immovable object (though thankfully the developers have taken a nod from the Forza Horizon series and made practically all scenic items in the game out of polystyrene so your car can slam through them willy nilly without taking so  much as a scratch). 

Shiny, but as tedious as being stuck in rush hour traffic. Remember what that felt like?

My cynical sneeryness hadn't subsided one iota a few hours in but then I had something of an epiphany, right around the time I got a few decent upgrades for my initial car, and certainly straight after I switched to another vehicle. 

Tuning, improving and upgrading your car are of course part and parcel elements in most arcade racers and indeed the NFS series itself, hell bent on giving you the most ridiculous tuning and customisation options to throw your time at (or, if you're like me, just download someone else's beautifully produced 'wrap' for your car, saves a lot of time and effort and there are obviously people out there in the community who have WAY too much time on their hands with some of the custom wrap options even outgunning Forza H's). 

But it was the handling that started to rapidly improve and perhaps my understanding of the 'slam on the accelerator' drift handling, as, just like the lunk-headed southern-drawling protagonist in "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" I stopped slamming into barriers and started drifting through corners like a concert ballerina. 

Dammit, I wanted to hate this game because I still think it's missing its vital potential, but by that point it had me in its grip! GRRR! Addiction swiftly followed, and though the whole game's storyline and main 'quests' are the same tired cliched old rubbish you've been used to in the last half a dozen or so NFS games, it really does feel like the developers have finally realised what they need to do in order to make this game feel good to play. 

I realise that I'm probably hoping against hope that the new generation of game consoles won't go without their own highly tuned arcade racers for long, it's a genre that has been sadly neglected, mostly because a few high profile games failed to sell well enough in the past, in fact several saw the death of the studios responsible for them (R.I.P Evolution Studios, Black Rock Studios, Bizarre Creations and Criterion). Yet NFS must still be just about selling well enough for EA to bother with it. 

"Heat" isn't the greatest game in the series (in fact for all its cheesiness, its direct predecessor, the aforementioned "Payback" was fun enough for me to play it right through to the bitter end - and never again since. As it was a free game on PS Plus a few of you have probably grabbed it and never downloaded or played it but it's worth a smidge of your time). If you, like me, aren't interested in paying full price for games like "Heat" (that really don't warrant it, they still feel a bit asset-stripped for DLC or store content) then pick it up in any one of the sales going on at the moment, you might be pleasantly surprised.