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03/01 - Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005)
08/01 - Need for Speed: Carbon
Couldn't help myself but jump on to this one as well. Unfortunately this one was a little disappointing, although still okay. I guess I should have known, since it's pretty similar to my original experience with the game, but I was starting to get excited about revisiting it this time. But it's definitely unambiguously where the series started to take a dip, even if the heights it was falling from were so high, this one still ends up being not bad overall.
While it has a lot of interesting new ideas, they did again come across as being very hit-and-miss with how well they worked. One big change is that cars are now separated in to three different classes, and have three different tiers to them. Different classes change how cars feel to drive, and tiers is just how good they are. But despite their different characteristics, no class feels particularly great. All classes have a much more sluggish turning radius than in MW, with muscle cars being the worst with no grip, but tuners being the closest to how the previous game felt, making them more or less acceptable to drive. The lower tiers all feel really slow too, and as a result pretty boring to drive. Only once you get up in to the third tier do they start getting fast enough to actually feel "fast" and more exciting to drive. I suppose the wider turning circle could be meant to emphasise your racing line more, but that doesn't really feel fair when you've got unpredictable traffic to weave in between, not to mention all the stuff you have to deal with in police chases.
Police chases themselves here don't get a big change in how they work, but instead are made redundant because of how the career mode treats them. You have no reason or incentive to engage with them at all, and even if you want to just for the fun of it, there is no option to start a chase on command. So when you do come across a chase, it's usually because one started halfway through a race, and it just makes you feel like the game is wasting your time when the race finishes and you have to lose them, instead of letting you get to the next objective. Not to mention how the police can get in the way in the race itself too. There also seems to be some small quirks with how they work that I'm not even sure is actually a thing with the game, or just me. But it feels like the rules of when the police can see you are off, and don't feel fair or believable. The interactive elements around the map that work as part of the chase mechanics somehow don't feel to be placed as well either. There never seems to be one around when you really need one.
Another big new thing is the crew member mechanics. In this game you lead a crew of racers, and they join you in races and have certain abilities depending on what one you pick. An interesting idea to make races somewhat cooperative, and let you play a bit more tactically. But in practice, they're kind of useless. Your crew member's abilities all require them to be in front of you to work, but of course it's still a race, so you still need to win. If your crew member crosses the line before you the win still counts, but there isn't really any point in that if you come 2nd as well. They might as well not be there, and you can't really trust them to come 1st if there are opponents between you and them. And a lot of the time, they will get in your way and brake in front of you for no reason as well.
There were a couple of cool things though. Like the Autosculpt feature. The game in general brings back quite a lot of customisation options that MW lacked, and some new ones too. But Autosculpt is pretty neat aside from that. The idea is that for specific car body parts, you can tweak the shape of various bits on it, to a pretty fine degree. So like if you want the vents on that bumper to be bigger, you can choose exactly how big you want them to be, or how tall or wide a spoiler is, etc. It's pretty cool, but sadly somewhat limited. There aren't a huge number of body kits you can do it with, and you can't do it to the full, wide kits, which are usually the best looking ones anyway. So they end up not getting used much. The wheels however are pretty cool. There's a reasonable variety of them, and you can do some surprising things with some of them, to genuinely make something unique, rather than just changing the size and shape of something.
Some of the new race modes are pretty cool too. The canyon races are a real highlight. The tracks themselves are good on their own. tight and technical, that frequently have some nice vistas to show you over the mountainside. But the canyon battle mode that takes place on them is very well done. It's the most fleshed out and comprehensive gamification of touge race rules I've seen in a game. They take the form of one-on-one races split in to two rounds. The first round, you follow the opponent down the track, where you build up a points total based on how close you stick behind them. On the second round you do the same, but with you in the lead, and you lose points from that previous total based on how close your opponent is to you. If you have any points left by the end of the second round, you win. Or if you manage to overtake them in the first, or manage to pull away far enough in the second. It's extremely tense, puts the pressure on, especially when during this mode you can also crash through the barriers and fall off the mountain on certain corners. The soundtrack is also pretty good during these races, as it cuts things down to just a simple but relentless war drum beat.
Drifting also makes a comeback, and is far better than in the Underground games. It's the style of drift mode where it has a dedicated handling model just for it, and these usually end up pretty bad in most games. Here it's a bit awkward at first, but once you get used to it, it's pretty enjoyable. You have a decent amount of control over your car during a drift, and it requires a fine touch, even if the car is technically sliding by itself. It's pretty satisfying to get right. And you get some drift events taking place on the canyon tracks, which can be extremely fun when you manage to nail it just right.
Aesthetically the game is quite nice. It goes back to the nighttime, neon heavy look, and it's still fairly attractive as that. One little flourish I like is that in the menus you get these streaks of neon colours wisping around the scene, evoking the look of the city lights as you zoom past them, or perhaps the cars themselves, weaving through the streets. It has some nice ambient music in there too. That said, the soundtrack in general is pretty underwhelming. It has a licensed music, but you almost never hear it. Only during free roam, or one specific race type. Otherwise it's generic thriller/action movie background music. The licensed soundtrack genre changes depending on what class of car you're driving too, so even when you do get to hear it, most of it is locked off at any given time. The FMV scenes appear here too, and they're okay I suppose. Even though they go for the same hammy feel as MW, the antagonists themselves are far less interesting, in that "love to hate them" sort of way. There are at least a couple of scenes early on with some of your crew members which are genuinely funny though, with some good comedic delivery. There are also scenes of mocapped in-engine facial animations, like L.A Noire, which are a bit weird. Technically they're kind of rough these days, but still have a kind of uncanny realism to them. And, fun fact, this game also happens to be the first role in a game of the voice of Adam Jensen.
And of course there's the issue of how notoriously short this game is. I always knew it was, but even then I was shocked at how slight this game is compared to MW, despite trying so many new things. I beat it in only three sittings. Mostly it was pretty easy too, apart from a pretty stiff difficulty spike in the last handful of events. In the end I didn't go with the mods that make the game longer, but I kind of wish I did. I tried to get them working, but they didn't install right, so I just decided to not bother, and just used minimal mods instead. But I do wish there was more to this, and clearly they always intended there to be, given how the mods restore content already in the game files. And I think perhaps with a longer game time some of those underwhelming features might have had more chance to shine. Or perhaps the opposite would happen and it's better that the game is short. Either way, that's what this game is. Admirable in some respects with a couple of genuinely cool ideas, but overall a bit of a half-baked mess.