Não sou um grande fã de jogos de corrida, mas este prendera minha atenção por um tempo. É um ótimo jogo daqueles para não se fazer nada, apenas ficar dirigindo pelo mapa, mas as
variadas missões também são boas e a rivalidade entre os dois lados (corredores e policiais) é bem interessante, lhe dando a liberdade de escolher um destes.

Apesar de ter poucos modelos de carros, todos são bem bonitos, e a quantidade é o suficiente para suprir a necessidade dos jogadores, que podem instalar complementos que o ajudarão em corridas e até em perseguições.

Os gráficos são bem bonitos até hoje, e o mapa com áreas variadas impede a jogatina de ficar monótona, pois você dirige por estradas entre florestas, pelo deserto e até próximo de montanhas congeladas, podendo correr sob um belíssimo nascer do sol digno de print ou enfrentar uma chuva pesada enquanto a polícia fica no seu encalço.

(Dica para joguinhos de corrida: um jeito de deixar sua jogatina ainda mais divertida é desabilitando a música do jogo e colocando uma playlist de sua escolha enquanto joga. Fica muito melhor com as músicas que você quer ouvir enquanto pisa fundo no acelerador. Admito que essa ideia foi o que me fez jogar esse NfS kkkk, mas o jogo é bem bom independente disso).

I have a like-dislike relationship with this. There isn't much here that strongly elates or repulses me, it maybe sums up how the lethargy the series was going through was preventing it from truly evolving.

The handling model is certainly not perfect, at times a chore to manoeuvre the cars regardless of model or how much I upgraded the control stat.
That said, driving a car through traffic at 200+ and obliterating other racers & cops at the same time on this game was actually quite fun on occasion, enough to keep going to the end (not that the game is exactly long or hard to beat in fairness). But crucially I didn't get that feeling enough on my playthrough and I got the annoying side of the handling system too often. I think deep in my heart I respect what Ghost Games were going for here, it just wasn't a great execution of that.

Also have to bring up issues with the map layout, as a whole it lacked coherence for me and driving through certain sections felt so unsatisfying to drive. the layout lacked imagination in most sections and the best I can say about it is that certain sections feel reminiscent of previous games (the forest area gave me Hot Pursuit II vibes, albeit a much less enjoyable version)

And with the core concept implemented here, that might be the peak of my like-dislike conflict. As a 8th-Gen launch title it's pretty neat that we saw Need for Speed offer an online multiplayer world that surrounds your story mode journey. In ways the implementation looks half-baked but I also think it wasn't a bad route to go. You can interact with other real people racing, including your friends, but it doesn't have too much baring on the story. Where this does become a pain though is that the story itself is for the most part one of NFS' most uninteresting yet, and if you are the doing the racer story and there are human cops that come across you in the middle of your mission, prepare to get spammed by level 4 ESF's & Shock Rams. But hey if you don't like that, you can just change it to friends only or single player. The game may feel more hollow in single player mode though.
Will say I really appreciate that the server is still available, the excruciating pains of host migration aside (which I wouldn't even hate if there wasn't points where I was mid-race and seemingly the AI were allowed to keep driving while I was stuck waiting)

Certainly not a bad game in the NFS series but certainly lacks overall depth and lacks consistently enjoyable racing

**3/4

Need for Speed Retrospective #20

Booting up a new Need for Speed game really is like a box of chocolates. With its always-online mentality, glossy wet look and esoteric storytelling, Ghost's first outing is once again something completely different.

As for the MMO-like qualities, the game Rivals most reminded me of was Ubisoft's The Crew, which came out only one year later and is now sadly defunct. The cool thing about The Crew, though, was its vast, exciting and explorable world. Here, we get little more than a series of tunnels in which we sporadically meet other players minding their business. Even the series' own Need for Speed: World handled the open-world aspects much better.

To my great dislike, the racer/cop split from the Hot Pursuit subseries is back and once again amounts to little more than the necessity to do the same content twice, as perfectly exemplified by the two identical unskippable tutorials the game starts with.

Despite my personal hatred for authorities and the complete lack of visual customizability, the gameplay on the cops' side might actually be superior. On the racer side, the fact that I couldn't even pause the game combined with the cops on constant lookout for me made the game unnecessarily stressful. At each safehouse I took a deep breath of relief, evaluating if going back out there was even worth it at all. After a couple of hours I naturally decided it wasn't and never bothered with the game again.

Windows PC version performance really sucks, the game is interesting in some ways, it tries to expand upon the ideas of HP2010 and MW2012, mixing concepts, it introduces a more linear map than MW2012, but more open than HP2010, we have new and more exxagerated weapons now, the atmosphere is great, the music goes for techno - rap, r and b.

Story is surprisingly ok for a racing game and definetly one of the main selling points,

The driving is the same from MW2012 and HP2010, which i really don't like, i prefer the blackboxy style of driving a lot more.

customization sucks in comparison to other games of the same franchise.

the speed points system is the best new feature.

the world is really bland and boring.

we don't have fast travel for what i know, that really sucks, a lot of mundane driving.

wanna play it again on console, this PC port is nearly unplayable

I completed ‘Need For Speed: Rivals’ about 3-4 days ago and already the space it occupied in my head has been replaced with the next game in the series ‘Need For Speed (2015)’ but I will try my best to remember my experience along with the notes I took at the time.

If ‘Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012)’ was a reboot of ‘Most Wanted (2005)’ then Rivals is a reboot of ‘Hot Pursuit’. EA took what they established in the Most Wanted reboot and improved on many aspects of the game, unfortunately not all of them though. The game starts immediately like previous games but there are so many dialogue boxes and tutorials for everything it stunts the pace a little bit. I do appreciate the tutorials though. As the previous games were online centric, this game is even more so. By default you’re connected to an online game with other people around the world. The first thing I did was set it to single player because I hate other people interfering with my game. The bigger downside of this is the fact you cannot pause the game at all, so if you start a race you’re committing yourself. Something which can be hard if you have other human commitments in your household. Once I stepped away from the game as my car was parked up and I came back after being arrested by the police.

Like ‘Hot Pursuit’, ‘Rivals’ allows you to pick either between being a Cop or a racer. I started off as a racer because to me that’s what I wanted out of the NFS games. As a racer though the cops are RELENTLESS. You’re constantly being chased by them and even if you hide down a side road for a bit of a breather or even to step away from the game for a bit they will start a pursuit out of nowhere and arrest you. One of my biggest moans about the NFS games is the prolonged “Crashed” cutscenes in this game. The cops are so aggressive you’ll be seeing this cutscene a lot. This mode was far too frustrating for me so I moved over to the Cop career.

The cop career is quite open for different playstyles, you don’t need to complete every race, just meet certain requirements such as complete X amount of different types of races or score a certain amount of points per session. I really liked this way of playing as it was more accessible, well, apart from having to complete hard races that was a bit of a pain at times.

This was the first of the Need For Speed games I played on PC due to a Steam sale and controller support. One thing that was very EA about this though was me being notified of a DLC pack (not on the sale) for £8 which allowed you to unlock all modifications straight away. Typical. Compared to the other PS3 and Xbox 360 NFS games I had played previously ‘Rivals’ looked incredible on PC.

The cars in ‘Rivals’ are solid, responsive and great fun to drive. I didn’t like the car selection screens though. There are so many cars that are similar and they are in no particular order so it is hard to compare different cars to pick the best one.

I did enjoy ‘Rivals’ more than the rest of the rebooted NFS games as it tried something new while still remaining fun and having remnants of the previous entries in the series. I do get the online features as I bet it could be so much fun to team up with friends and chase each other as racers and cops but baking it into the single player game is frustrating. Do you know what else is frustrating? They still have the flashing screen when going through speed cameras. It isn’t as bad as ‘Most Wanted (2012)’ but still a sensory overload.

Need for Speed Rivals makes a terrible first impression, with some of the worst dialogue ever put into a game right from the starting cutscene, always online DRM that makes you unable to even PAUSE THE FUCKING GAME, a useless navigation system that will have you looking at your minimap at all times, horrible visual clarity in shortcuts, instantly recovering all health and used items on gas stations eliminating any resource management or risk of dying, a good risk-reward currency system wasted on a store so bare bones that it might as well not even be there, spawning facing the wrong way after crashes in races, having to lose the cops if you ever want to restart an event they showed up in (something Most Wanted had the foresight of avoiding EIGHT years before) and the perfectly functional balance of Hot Pursuit's combat being tipped in favor of the police for reasons I can't comprehend.
This is enough to understand why this game is so divisive, but "Hot Pursuit but open world" and a diverse selection of challenges are enough to make this game fun. Even if the map is pretty tiny. And if most of the roads are claustrophobically thin. And even if having to lose the cops every five minumtes as a racer is the most annoying shit ever.
Okay yes this game has way too many problems but it also manages to not make me want to gouge my eyes out like the previous game so it's worth a play if you've already played every other good need for speed.