It has been two years since EA put out an entry in their flagship racing franchise with Need for Speed: Rivals. It was the first game developed by studio Ghost Games, who were composed of a lot of former Criterion Games members (a studio that has worked on two Need for Speed titles, themselves). Rivals worked for me despite its lackluster persistent online feature that ultimately added little to the experience, but it showed promise. With Need for Speed, Ghost Games has returned with a reboot to the franchise that feels like a greatest hits of previous games in the series, but has far too many basic problems that keep it in first gear.
The first major feature of Need for Speed is that it is always online, forcing players to inhabit the game’s world of Ventura Bay with other players. It’s a novel idea, and racing with friends can be a lot of fun, but now let me introduce the first glaring issue with this concept: The multiplayer feels too secondary. It exists, but is not presented anywhere in menus as there is no actual multiplayer mode. You’re online and you run into other players who you can set up races with — plus there is your crew which holds up to eight players — but it seems like a really shoddily put together system. I’m sure the intention is seamless integration with the single player components, but it winds up feeling like background noise rather than an extra layer of immersion.
For an arcade-like game such as Need for Speed, it is a bit ridiculous to not have even an option to do some sort of online competition. There are only five game modes in all of the game, though, and one of them — Drift Trains — would be impossible with other players. Players will get their fill of these modes through the game’s ludicrous narrative. What makes Need for Speed rather charming is its use of live-action FMV cutscenes that introduce characters who are all really terribly written and acted but cross into that so-bad-it’s-good territory. There are small moments between characters that make you feel like something has happened between them or there is some undisclosed information no one is telling you. Those moments don’t make the constant chugging of Monster energy drinks (as if they are equivalent to alcohol) feel any less cheesy, but rather help solidify FMV as a pretty fun thing to have in the franchise.
Live-action FMV appeared previously in 2006’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which also had a similar structure of desiring to race against a specific character. This time, though, there are only five icons that you’ll be vying to race against, each admired by one of the five main characters in your crew. For example, Spike is a guy who loves driving fast and admires Magnus Walker — a real-life Porsche collector. Each of the five real world icons that the crew looks up to represent a specific element of the Need for Speed franchise: Speed, Style, Build, Crew, and Outlaw. Speed is fairly straight forward, and Style mostly consists of being able to drift. It’s the last three that feel more uniquely Need for Speed than the others.
Build is where this game borrows from the Need for Speed: Underground series with its love of tuner culture and making a great car that feels like your own. I found myself sticking to my Dodge Viper for the longest time because I had tuned its handling to my comfort level and spent a lot of money and time customizing it. The best part of Need for Speed is its willingness to let you customize almost every aspect of your car, including the fine-tuning of the handling. The tuning is there to make it so that players can adjust how much they want to be able to drift versus straight-forward driving. I found myself testing out even minor tweaks from simply adjusting tire pressure to how easily my brakes locked up.
Then there are the more annoying parts of Need for Speed that begin with the previously mentioned game mode, Drift Train. It’s not a race, though there are checkpoints. Instead, the game rewards players who do drifts within a very close vicinity of other racers with a drift train bonus. In Drift Train, you only get points if you perform drift trains. Where this becomes frustrating is in almost every aspect of the game’s mechanics and rules. Players lose points from a drift the moment they touch another car or a hard obstacle. You don’t get partial point, you simply lose it all. This wouldn’t be frustrating if it felt like the AI was at all involved in the same competition you are. In theory, the AI should not speed ahead of you if you crash your car and fall behind because the only way points can be awarded is by being together. It’s a team-based mode, yet your entire team is not providing you with points or helping you to get points. Instead, they’re racing to a finish line that doesn’t even matter because the objective is only to get drift train points.
The AI overall is an absolute mess because they rubber-band during races in order to create a constant sense of tension. I might knock a racer into a wall, which should keep them off of my tail for a while as I hit the nitrous and speed away, only that I find them immediately catching up to me the moment I slow down for a turn. It is extra annoying in the later events because the difficulty spikes to an insane degree where everyone is constantly tailing you. And because the game only takes place at nighttime, it’s difficult to not crash into things and wind up in last place, never being able to catch up again. Any sense of progression I’d feel from upgrading my car to make it extremely fast and handle well feels void because of how easy it is for all of the AI to beat you in anything you do.
A specific example I ran into was during a time trial near the end of the game when I saw both cars crash in a way that would pause my game for a couple seconds if I had done it and ensure last place. Instead, these cars did a flip in the air and then immediately got back to high speeds. The rules of the game seem to only apply to the player, and everyone else is just forced into a specific role. Need for Speed never seems prepared for an AI to do something bad like crash, and instead tries its best to force them back into the race. The Drift Train events are still the worst because while I’m watching out for other drivers and trying not to lose my score by hitting them, they are doing whatever they have been programmed to do, which tends to mean hitting my car and taking away my score.
It’s funny because you would think that this rubber-banding would make for great AI when it comes to cop chases, but it actually seems to start and stop with racers. The Outlaw elements of the game force the player to antagonize the police and maintain long chases and rack up plenty of outlaw reputation. Unfortunately, I rarely ran into police unless it was a specific race that was designed to have a cop appear. Then there are objectives while free roaming that you have to complete involving maintaining a police chase for five minutes, which is only possible if you’re a terrible driver or you keep slowing down for the cops to keep up with you. It is understandable that the rubber-banding would be applied only to competitors but when the cops are supposed to be a prevalent force against racers, it’s absurd to exclude them from racer methods. What is worse is that Ghost Games did cop chases well in Need for Speed: Rivals.
Need for Speed looks beautiful, though, especially when driving at high speeds at night. At times you’ll move straight from live-action to in-game graphics such as in the garage, and everything looks photo-realistic. The game attempts to highlight its beauty with collectible photographs of vistas around Ventura Bay, but since the game only takes place at night, they tend to be parking lots and lit-up corner stores as opposed to sweeping shots of a cliff or valley. I’m not entirely sure why the game doesn’t utilize a day-night cycle, other than that there are less civilians driving around to hit. Other collectibles are insignificant things, such as doing donuts in specific locations and free parts for your car that are rarely as good as what you can get from the garage itself.
Rarely did I find myself running into performance issues, but the game did crash to the PS4 home screen twice on one occasion and then once again on another. On top of this, I had two races which had no competitors populate when they should have been appearing. A drifting competition was a breeze because there was no one to run into, and a race was essentially just me taking my time and collecting Reputation from drifting because no other racers appeared in my race. Most of these seem like they stemmed from the always-online components, which remains a shame because it is not a game that benefits greatly from that feature.
I found myself occasionally enjoying my time with Need for Speed, but by the time I hit the difficulty spike and all of its flaws started showing themselves aggressively, I was done with the game. The story is relatively short, consisting of roughly 80 events divided up into a handful of different types of races. All of the endings to the characters’ stories fall flat and lose whatever momentum they might have had. I’m still pretty sure I didn’t actually like any of the characters because they are so obsessive about one particular thing and they never stop talking about them. That being said, Need for Speed does make a solid case for maintaining live-action FMV and elaborate tuning options. I still enjoy cop chases in the series, but this game somehow manages to fumble with those and its overall AI. Races just feel contrived in their tension, and that just won’t fly in a series where racing is the crux.