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Need For Speed: Most Wanted (Criterion/EA, 2012)
Need For Speed (Ghost/EA, 2015)
Driving games are my abnegation (or "brain off", for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of aesthetics of gameplay - Extra Credits on this topic (video)) activity. That might seem weird to some people who regard them as tricky fast-reactions stuff, but to me it's a simple thing to relax into the rhythm of racing lines and see how fast I can get a bunch of polygons from A to B (and then usually around to A again).
(I'm less good in the real world, I've found; I enjoy karting, but I don't judge braking points as well as people who do it more often. I should do it more often, but it's less fun without other people.)
So it was fairly inevitable that I'd end up going through the NFS games in the Origin vault. The series, for those who aren't familiar, has a few features in common - an open world design, an underground street racing circuit which you're part of (meaning that as well as racing against other competitors the police will show up and try to arrest you, which generally means "ram you off the road"), a large number of different cars which one can drive and the opportunity to upgrade these cars.
Most Wanted is the oldest of these games, and it shows. It's perfectly playable (I something-close-to-100%ed it), but it doesn't really feel like you're actually playing an open world game (sure, you can drive around the city, but you'll probably mostly use the menus), and a lot of it feels kind of churned out (maybe like the most stereotypical output of EA management practices). There's 41 cars, but most of them feel almost identical, and all of them are customisable in exactly the same way (down to the hilarious option to trick out a Tesla Roadster with a nitro boost) and generally you should apply the exact same upgrades in all cases. In practice there's about six cars with different models. There's no story at all to the game, and the city, "Fairhaven", vaguely East-Coast USish as I understand it, doesn't feel particularly alive to me. That said, the driving mechanics are basically solid, the game rubberbands somewhat (most driving games do), but not incredibly annoyingly, and the traffic is more "something that shakes things up" rather than "argh get out of the way", so it's perfectly diverting and nice and easy to drop into and out of, which is what I wanted and so why I spent so long playing it.
Need for Speed (2015) - the game was considered a reboot, so it's got no release number or subtitle, though Wikipedia reckons it's something like the 20th release that wasn't a primarily mobile or handheld title - comes three years later, and it's acquired a lot of polish. The game is visually gorgeous, the open-world feels alive, and the city, "Ventura Bay", is much more obviously San Francisco. We've got a proper storyline with (weirdly, what is this, 1996?) FMV cutscenes, and the car customisation actually feels far more alive - the entire game is a hymm to car culture. The music feels like the sort of thing that I would be listening to if I were involved in underground street racing (which means I don't like it much as music, but it's definitely thematically correct - Most Wanted's didn't feel right, but on the other hand it did get one track, Dead Sara's Weatherman, into my playlists). The driving "feel" is excellent, though instead of maybe six types of car we're now down to two really - either it grips when you turn in to a corner or it drifts. That might be partially because we've lost the off-road races, though we do now have drift contests and some weird mixture of drifting and speed to fill in the blanks. There's theoretically not as much game as Most Wanted, but a lot of that's because they've not needlessly padded it and there's much less "do the same race you did before but in a different car". On the downside, the rubber-banding effect is enormous and extremely obvious, particularly in the time trial or hot lap events wherein I would never win if I put in a quick lap at the start, because the AI would rubber-band itself up to unmatchable levels; but if I didn't get it together until the end, I could easily win with a time significantly slower than the hot lap I'd done in my previous attempt and had finished fourth with. Similarly, the AI blatantly cheats with the "icon" cars, which have an enormous amount more power when the real-life people they've got showing up in the game are nominally in them than they do have when you get them. So I feel like a lot of how well you get on with the game will relate to your tolerance for this sort of nonsense. Oh, and your tolerance for games which only play in online mode, since it also does that. Unlike say Starcraft 2 it does actually add something to the game - it's fun to be driving along and watch some other player hare past in the other direction being chased by three police cars, or for that matter to be being chased by three police cars and grin as some other poor sap takes them out in a head-on collision as they weren't paying sufficient attention, and it definitely adds to immersion. Still, I get why some people don't like it and I felt pretty ambivalent about it myself at first.
So I'm not recommending either of these games, but I did have fun playing them!
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