For a long time the Need for Speed franchise has bumbled along, under the helm of developers Ghost Studios, and has barely lit a fire under the games charts with every release feeling slightly lacking in some way. So EA, in their infinite wisdom, have gone back to the studio who made (arguably) the best of the modern NFS games - Need for Speed Hot Pursuit - and come up with something that feels fresher and more satisfying to play than any NFS game since HP.
But, and there's a big achingly wobbly Anime-styled but here, it's far from perfect - and here's why.
The game is story driven for the single player stuff which is good, as who doesn't love being a loner pitched against an unassailable foe right from the outset. In the initial scenes of the game life is good, you're working for a garage stocked with amazing cars and you're working on your magnum opus along with your bestie, producing a racing machine that can take on the cream of the street racing crop.
Then one night all that goes to hell in a handbasket as your bestie teams up with an old friend, rips off the garage, steals all the rides (including your magnum opus) and sets herself up as the queen of the underground racing scene. Weirdly the garage owner spends most of the rest of the game bumbling on about social media rather than reporting this grand theft auto to the local constabulary, but it'd be a pretty short game if that sort of nonsense didn't happen. So it's up to you to rebuild the garage's rep, get yourself an old junker or two, and turn them into contenders on the circuit and off.
Here's the first of those big wobbly 'buts'. The game is painfully, excruciatingly slow to work your way through. Most of the early races pay up chicken feed, and given that you won't win most of them you end up with even less cash to spend on your ride - which I guess does at least force you to think about each and every upgrade.
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| No need for indicators here, it's a beemer |
Just as you get comfortable and start winning though, all your opponents up their games substantially and sometimes you'll find yourself either unable to enter races (for having the wrong class of car) or having the game "nanny" you into a car it thinks you should use for the upcoming race. Several times I found myself choosing a ride I knew I could win with, only for the game to select the 'lamer clunker' from my collection of rides instead, leaving me trailing at the back of the pack, often losing my stake or buy-in money from having to use something less powerful / less worthy.
The game mixes up race styles between street racing, drifting (drift events are actually very good, I tend to measure a game's worth by these and whether the driving mechanic of the game is up to nice satisfying handbrake turns around corners - which thankfully Criterion DID at least sort out ) and weird events where you need to smash through wooden pallets, fences and barrels in order to rack up a score.
The anime styling of the game that you see in screenshots isn't actually as tacky or jarring as it seems, and the character options would make a Sims 4 fan happy.
But that weird grind never goes away, worse still when you get to the qualifier events, realise you don't have enough money to buy-in (or a car that's any good for winning those events) and are forced to relive the friday before the race over, and over, and over again groundhog day stylee until you finally 'get gud' enough to progress past the qualifier. With the buy in for later events being upwards of $100,000 yet your average earnings from each race day / night being around 10-20 grand, you can see how frustrating it gets to have to continually reboot your day like this.
I had a couple of other weird issues with the game too that I paranoically put down to 'controller drift' (yet I've never experienced anything like it in other games). Sometimes the car just would not steer - at all - when racing. I'd slide the thumbstick left or right to drift gracefully round a corner only for the car to stubbornly keep going forwards, ignoring my inputs. It would always happen at the most unpredictable times too, which just really robbed me of any enjoyment I had during those races where it occurred.
Weirdly though I've put a lot of time into this. At its best, it looks utterly gorgeous with plenty of polish and glistening water effects perhaps making use of the hideously underused (by most games) PS5 powaaah.
It belts along at a hell of a pace as well once you start moving upwards to the faster cars, or when you get to deliver some of the better cars for your customers at Rydell's Rides. Playing a racing game that doesn't drop any frames or suffer from Vsync issues is pretty much where we should be by now on consoles, so it's good to see that Criterion haven't lost their touch in polishing their games to the nth degree.
If you can see past the grind and put some of the games more annoying aspects of the game to the back of your mind (such as the fact that once you've won a couple of races, your 'heat' level goes up to a point where every single cop in Lakeside will want a piece of your ass - and if they catch you, you will lose ALL the money you've earned that day / night) you'll find a lot of fun here, and it genuinely is one of the better modern NFS efforts. I just wish they'd done a few things differently with the qualifiers and the choice of rides for your races (and that weird controller issue).
6/10
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