Racing Into The Night In ‘Need For Speed’

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mamasan2000

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Another 10 hour game with annoying hipster dialogue and physics coded by 5 year olds. Always night time. A rip-off.

Yes pls (sarcasm)

"own the cars of your dreams"?
Really...I bet a Nissan Micra IRL is more exciting to drive than anything in NFS.
 

Chris Droste

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...so in the End this Is Need for Speed: Underground 3... or is that 4 now? kinda meh. LOVED Most Wanted though. I personally love the physics as the hardcore sim stuff in GT3/4/5 had me focusing too damn much on the instruments to make sure i was "going the right speed" to make turns, etc that i couldn't enjoy those. I like more open world stuff. but without a compelling core story or some robust group play I don't feel any compelling reason to pick this one up unless i want to say "i've played ALL the NFS series" but that desire left me largely by the time Prostreet kicked in and the reviews unanimously poo-poo'd it.
 

JacFlasche

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I will grudgingly confess that I have played NFS unleashed shift2 more than a few times.
And more than a few times, in fact many many times, when I play it, I wish I had the person responsible for AI of the opponents cars tied up in my basement so I could slowly beat them to death with a chain.
Like every time I waste a half hour in a race and another cars just crashes into me and I get a penalty for going of track, I could go down and smash them in the face a few times.
That would be fair don't you think?

Is there any racing AI that doesn't suck?

Samsung 800Hz 1080p 55" PLASMA panel * CORSAIR RM1000X 1000W * GIGABYTE
Gaming 7 MB * G.SKILL TridentZ 16GB DDR4 3400 * Intel Core i7-6700K *
SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB * MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti * Thrustmaster T500 *
Acoustic Research speakers
 

Avus

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I like playing racing game, but this is one of the most disappointing title in 2015.
You can save your $60 for this POS....
- There is no manual transmission option!! Automatic only is completely insane. I just lost a race because the game was downshifting crazy late. You WILL stuck at 6th gear at low rpm and cannot do anything about it... (except brake and let AI pass you :angry: )

-No in car view and this is a 2015 games with not many cars included.

- There are numerous time trial events, which, for some reason totally unbeknownst to me, the game forces you to run with an AI partner sometimes. These partners have no reason to be there. You are not racing against them. And this AI is so damn stupid. They will actively try to run you off the road. Why in the actual fxxk am i being forced to run a time trial event with another car who is active trying to ruin my race?

- it's weird only driving at night and twlight and then night again...

- Raining is always in this game or after rain. This entire game is a wet sloppy mess...

- Constant phone calls from storyline crew telling you to meet here, or there, or go to this race. It's like having your cusin Roman in GTA4 constantly asking you to go bowling.

- When you open up the map screen, your car keeps moving. I have never in my 20+ years of racing games ever seen anything like that. When you open an entirely new new screen, they gameplay should damn well pause. WTF. This is has NO pause.

- not that many car choices as well. No modern Nissan Z cars, only 1976 Fairlady, no EVO 8, no '10 STi hatch, no 22B Sti... but you get FRS, BRZ, GT86 which basically are the same cars... <_<

- AI is bizarre. They will, at one point, be losing by a huge margin, only to come back out of nowhere to win. (aka rubber band AI)

-Now, we come to the most insufferable, inexcusable, unforgivable part, The Inter thing. You MUST be connected to EA's servers at ALL times, or else the game will just shut down. Yes, that's mean if they are doing maintenance, you can't play. They just did that 2 days ago! I got kicked off my single player, offline game because some smart person at EA decided that 8:00pm was a good time to do server maintenance. This is absolutely mind-blowing to me. This isn't an MMORPG, this isn't an FPS shooter thing, it's a bloody racing game, and I am forced to connect to the INternet or I can't play it period. This is insulting. This is EA at its absolute worst.

- The entire story is an advertisement for Monster Energy sodas. I counted 3 times you were handed a Monster drink in first person at a party. Ken Block is wearing Monster gear, people are wearing hats, people are constantly drinking Monster. It's so offensively blatant it's hard to tell if it was either a joke or a test. We are talking about at least 20-25minutes of HD footage of Monster advertisements. Who the fxxk will drink Monster drinks at the party?? :facepalm:
 

Achoo22

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Why did they make it always online? It's annoying AF.
Because of DRM, that's why.
It's deeper than that, though. It's really about a desperate need to control every aspect of the gameplay while collecting analytic data about its players.

I can't speak for console gamers, but EA has made it terrifically easy to ignore all of their products these days. The buzz, even for their popular titles, is short lived and I do not run Origin.
 

Achoo22

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I very much enjoyed this mini-review. You covered many of the points that matter to me. Thanks.
 

Anathemata

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Two things killed it for me: the cut-scenes, and the lack of controlled gameplay.

The cut-scenes were just awful. Yes, as stated above, they were blatant promotions for Monster. In addition, they were written, directed, and acted terribly. I am SO glad the trophy for the outlaw reveal was named "Were you surprised? Yeah, me neither." because it was obvious from the start.

The gameplay kills me, too. Yes, I know I don't play NFS to run a perfect line in every race. I know the physics is BS, and I know that this is not a realistic racing simulation. That doesn't mean you can both completely ignore car damage and make it difficult to stay on the road. You also can't program the AI to run into you in every race. Rivals was pretty good in this regard. The physics was a pure fantasy, but there were still ground rules to the driving that you could follow that allowed you to run without incident and be rewarded for it. In this game, I crash three times in the final outlaw mission on my first try and still come in first place.

I will still push for the platinum trophy, but only because I am a sucker for this franchise and I want to be able to say I completed the entire game. For their next title I am going to wait for the reviews before I spend my money.
 
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