I fully expected that I would never play this game. I had already long since sworn off giving EA money when it came out, plus I was very against the idea of buying an always-online game from any company, let alone EA, and to top it all off, I was hearing nothing but negativity surrounding this game at the time. Fast forward a few years and Heat comes out, supposedly being the first good Need for Speed game since Black Box, and after enough of the constant praise, I gave in. That was the first time I had given EA money in ten years... and I got it back, because through some unfathomable reasoning, I was allowed a refund after playing through the entire game... so I think my streak still counts as unbroken - 14 or 15 years now! Unbound recently caught my eye though, and this time for more specific reasons. Rather than simply being influenced by an outpouring of positive reception, I heard a lot of people point out specific areas that have been improved since Heat, and many of them were areas I was complaining about... but overall, it still seemed to be just a minor iteration, barely a step forward. Even if it was amazing though, my refusal to buy from EA is stronger now than it ever was thanks to them choosing to charge an unacceptable $70 for games, a price I refuse to pay for any game from any company, and just as a stinky little bonus, the controls still aren't remappable in Unbound, which is a deal breaker.
But something strange happened with the release of Unbound. I actually saw criticism happening - reasonable criticism. For the first time in I don't even know how long, I saw the racing game cult being (mostly) reasonable on the internet. The game was not mindlessly praised nor mindlessly hated, it was instead discussed with a degree of nuance, analyzed on a level beyond graphics, and compared to other games that people felt did some things better or worse... mostly. One of the games I saw it compared against was Need for Speed 2015... and that's the first time I saw 2015 portrayed in a positive light by someone with something of substance to say. That got me curious. Lo and behold, a treasure trove of retrospective praise I did find, numerous people looking back on 2015 and claiming that this was, in fact, the best Need for Speed game made by Ghost, coming from people who panned it on release. Some of these claims seemed as hyperbolic as ever, but plenty were thoughtful and relatively balanced. That made me want to see for myself... but, you know, EA bad and also always-online bad, so no dice. I had already gone so long without ever touching it anyway, so it wasn't difficult to resign myself to the thought that I would lose my chance to play this game, since it will likely disappear for a very long time, if not forever, when EA shuts down the servers.
Then I got the game for free. When faced with the opportunity to play a game that has an expiration date despite being unwilling to pay for it, I ain't saying no.
My immediate first impressions were as follows:
- "Wow, this game looks phenomenal."
- "Wow, this controller support sure is broken."
- "Wow, this handling sure feels wrong."
- "What do you MEAN seven speed Honda Civic???"
I had positive thoughts too, but let's save the positive stuff for later. First I want to talk about the handling, but before I do, I want to quickly mention the thing about the controller support. This game does have remappable controls, which is good, that's the bare minimum that no other Need for Speed game since has met. However... part of me wonders if this game is the reason the future ones don't have that feature. Controller support on the PC version is flat out broken. If you use anything other than an Xbox controller, good luck, and even then some people apparently have some of the same problems with those. I use a Dualshock 4, factually the best controller, and the game detected it twice, both as DInput and XInput, and it confused the controller with my nonexistent racing wheel too, because no matter what I remapped the circle button to, it only ever opened the phone. The solution? Unmap every single control for both the keyboard and the racing wheel, then reset all control profiles to default, then download some random person's actual settings file and replace mine with that one. Baffling issues... and they just left them in there. Never fixed. Did they not know how? Did they drop remappable controls from future games because they would rather give up than figure out how to fix whatever was wrong here? Who knows, none of it makes sense from any angle.
Now then, I want to focus on the handling because while it is definitely bad, I don't think it's entirely irredeemable. At times, the car grips well and it feels good, high grip and responsive controls at high speed is exactly what I want from an arcade racer. At other times, the car will enter a drift as I expect it to and hold it the way I want it to, which also feels great, having the ability to drift smoothly and easily is another great thing for arcade racers to deliver. The problem is that these times are rare. Most of the time, the car understeers heavily, oversteers heavily, or does both at the same time, and when any of those things happen, it bleeds off speed ridiculously fast, to the point that I once dropped from 150 to 140 miles per hour in about half a second with nothing but the lightest nudge on the stick to take an extremely shallow turn while going downhill.
Making things worse is that unless you want to drift all the time, tuning doesn't help, because it turns out grip is entirely unviable and only ever leads to severe understeer, and therefore severely slow cars. Tuning for drift isn't simple either though, because anything other than the perfect sweet spot of settings will result in a car that either hesitates to drift and ends up in the outside walls, or one that turns in way too hard and fast and ends up in the inside walls. Worse still is how inconsistent the handling is, because sometimes the car will grip, maybe it will drift, maybe it will spin, maybe it will understeer directly into the wall, maybe it won't respond at all, and any of these things could happen under the same conditions on the same corner seemingly at random.
By far the most egregious problem, however, is the unpredictability of simply driving in a straight line. Numerous times, I found myself suddenly taking a hard right turn without touching the left stick. All I did was shift up a gear, and that caused a hard right turn, time and time again. I ended up trying a little stress test to see how unpredictable things could get by quickly and repeatedly shifting up and down while driving straight, and also while slightly swerving with light touches on the left stick, and in both cases my car would frequently but randomly fling itself wildly off the road. Sometimes the game broke so badly that my car would jerk to the left while simultaneously starting a drift to the right, and by continuing to shift up and down while that happened, I could make the car drive (nearly) straight while at a 45 degree angle. It's incomprehensible. It feels like a worse version of the drifting from ProStreet, but all the time. This happened in the Civic, but I wanted to see how a rear wheel drive car acted with this model so I bought an RX7 as soon as possible because of course that's what I'd buy, and surprise surprise, it is orders of magnitude worse in a rear wheel drive car.
I had a lot more patience with Heat. The handling in that game was at least serviceable, so I could finish the game without mods. But this? I can't tolerate it. After only a few hours of play, I had to install a handling mod. While looking for that, I also found a mod for gear ratios and RPM for some cars, so I grabbed that one too since a Civic with seven gears is just too silly and I don't even want to know what other silliness lies in wait. And I found a mod that removes the raindrop effect on the screen, so I grabbed that too because that effect was my only real gripe with the visuals that could be modded out. And an intro video remover because the unskippable intro was annoying. The way to actually use these mods is most definitely the worst modding experience I've ever had, because Frosty Mod Manager is a putrid piece of software that barely works when it's in a good mood, and troubleshooting it is basically impossible since it seems like nobody even knows how it works at all and the developers even disabled the issues tab on their GitHub repo - and I remember the days of manually editing the contents of the Minecraft JAR file, that was preferable to this. And with what these mods actually do, and how FMM simply creates symlinks in the game directory, I really don't understand why we can't just drag and drop mod files into a mod folder and load them with a DLL or something. Instead, we get mods that only work with this one program and nothing else for no good reason, and the endless joy of not knowing what's happening or how to fix it when the mods stop loading even though nothing changed. Anyway, mini rant aside, those last three are minor enough changes that I wouldn't say they affect my thoughts on the game itself at all, but the handling mod is definitely a big change and I recognize that the game I'm playing is no longer the same game that Ghost made, but...
I like it. Quite a lot, actually. The whole game, not just the handling mod.
So before I get into the rest of the game, let me finish up the handling topic real quick. The mod I installed isn't perfect either, but it also changes very little. This isn't a physics overhaul at all, it's simply a slight modification to the way grip works, a few changed values including a gigantic nerf to the brake-to-drift system that also makes it possible to adjust how sensitive it is, and a couple different tuning sliders to make it theoretically easier to find that sweet spot that the cars still need. The result of these minor changes is, above all else, consistency. Grip tunes handle much more like I expected them to without any unpredictable quirks, understeer is dramatically reduced (though it is still disappointingly intense), oversteer is less punishing and doesn't immediately switch you into drift mode anymore, both understeer and oversteer punish your speed much less... it's still not what I'd most like, but it feels like what the developers intended. Drift, meanwhile, is also a lot more consistent thanks to the different handling for drifting being less different now, so entering and exiting drift happens much smoother and it's much easier to hold a drift as one would expect to be able to do... albeit still not ideal, as some of the problems (like a delay between when a small drift stops and the car becomes controllable again) would require a total overhaul that's outside the scope of this mod. This, too, is still not my favorite, but it feels like what the developers intended.
The key to good driving remains to be finding the sweet spot in tuning, and if you accept the game for what it is and try to play into its strengths rather than fight against its shortcomings, that sweet spot involves high speed low angle drifting. The lower the angle, the better, because that's what feels the fastest, whether or not it actually is. Even just a few degrees of angle, so little that it almost looks like a regular slip angle expected in grip driving, is enough to keep the car going fast through a corner as long as the game thinks you're drifting, and as much as I hated brake-to-drift in Heat and still have a strong distaste for the concept when the handbrake button is right there, using it with this mod is how to make the driving in this game shine. By adjusting the brake-to-drift threshold and finding the low angle sweet spot of the car, you can achieve an almost normal driving experience by essentially tricking the game. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to achieve this, which led me to stick with just my NSX for a very long time, with the Civic and the Corolla as backups for certain things. Everything else I tried didn't work out quickly enough for me to want to keep them around. Fortunately, I like the NSX a lot and it was a lot of fun to drive the whole time since that's the car where I really felt the handling model clicked with me. I was never bored.
The base handling model of this game is unequivocally worse than Heat as a whole, but in parts, the bones of something better than Heat were in there, and this mod simply brings those parts out. Without this mod, the good moments with both grip and drift handling were very rare, but with the mod installed, they're normalized. All of the same problems from the unmodded game are still present, but those inconsistencies are now rare rather than constant. Unfortunately for me and my preferences, drifting is still the fastest way around almost every corner... but that's clearly what the developers intended, so I can't be too mad about it. All in all, this mod polishes up the existing handling model into something much closer to what it should have been from the start: Arcade handling done decently. It could absolutely be better than this, but it doesn't have to be, it's good enough like this. I may prefer grip over drift, because I miss the days where arcade racers were ridiculously fast and the cars had more grip than F1 cars, but you know what I miss more than that? Arcade racers, period. This game with this mod scratches that itch better than most things in recent memory.
You know something else a lot of arcade racers used to have in The Before Times? Stories. Need for Speed itself used to have stories, like every single game Black Box made. This game also has a story, and that is the one point I still see nothing but disdain for online, both past and present. The vast majority of complaining about it I see boils down to only two points, though... "it's cringe" and "it's forgettable." Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but... I think if you enjoyed the story from any of the Black Box need for speed games on any level, you're not allowed to have a problem with this game's story unless you can both explain your problem in fine detail, and acknowledge that the old games had the same problems. Yes, the story is extremely cheesy and forgettable, but you know what else it is? A perfect product of its time. Just like the Black Box games were, on both counts.
The people calling the story "cringe" are mostly the same old heads that played the Black Box games when they were kids and hold onto their nostalgia with militant fervor that only Pokemon fans can match, kids that don't know how to have their own opinions yet, and teenagers whose opinions on anything are automatically disqualified. As for memorability, the only reason the Black Box games are seen as memorable is because everyone either played them as kids so they made a stronger impression, or played them for the first time today and reveled in the cheese of a bygone era, because what's cheesy and forgettable one year tends to become charming and memorable years later. Give it another ten years and I'm fully confident that the same exact situation will play out with this game, where the ones who played it as kids remember it well and look back on it fondly, and... well, nobody will be able to play it for the first time after that long, so scratch that I guess. Is it good? No, but is that a surprise? None of the other Need for Speed stories were good either, and that's not a problem. This shouldn't even be a talking point, but here we are.
Personally, I only have two main issues with the story. First is the first person point of view in the cutscenes, because the actors sometimes get way too close to the camera and that makes me uncomfortable. Still nowhere near as bad as Undercover, at least. The other problem, or in other words, the real problem I have with the story is that it isn't just non-linear, it's all over the place. There is no real path of progression to follow, because there are instead five separate paths that are all happening at the same time, and the primary presentation of these stories is through phone conversations that happen pretty much all the time. I could be in the middle of a race and get three different phone calls before the finish line, all inviting me to a different race. I wish things happened a bit slower. Less phone calls and texts happening all the time, and less things happening simultaneously. Even if the story paths remained completely unchanged, I think I'd enjoy them more if the game only gave you one at a time. Being non-linear is fine, let the player switch to another path whenever they want, I don't mind that, I just wish the game would stay on one path until the player chooses otherwise. The Black Box need for speed games had the opposite problem, where the story progression in those games was extremely slow. What I really want is the middle ground, but I have yet to find that middle ground in any racing game from the last decade.
I'm not going to just leave it at that, though. I think the story actually has something worth praising. Unfathomable, I know. There is one thing that the story of this game does very, very well... and that is creating an atmosphere. Yes, plenty of the dialogue is very "hello there fellow kids" in nature, but it's not hard to look past that and realize that there is actually a direction here. It's not a soulless corporatized husk of a game like Forza Horizon, and the whole "influencer" """style""" that so many games (especially racing games) lean into lately is nowhere to be found here, and quite frankly, considering that not only does this game attempt a fake social media thing on some screens to try and add character, but Ken Block is literally in the game and a character actually tries to show you one of his videos on their phone in a cutscene... it's downright impressive that the whole fans/followers/whatever thing isn't part of this. This game has a personality, it has an identity, and it has atmosphere. All three of those things are extremely important aspects for a good arcade racer, and they're also the things that so, so many games in recent years struggle with, including Heat, a game that got far less attention for its bad story despite it being so much worse than this. But even if you discount everything I just said as praise about the story in this game, it still stands much stronger than the story in Heat for one simple reason: Sincerity.
The story in Heat felt like an overcorrection, like EA saw the backlash to the story of 2015 and forced Heat's story to get serious'd up, which ended up turning it into a cookie cutter high stakes serious story that takes itself seriously... meanwhile in 2015, there are no stakes. It's lighthearted. It's just a bunch of car nuts sincerely wanting to impress the people they look up to, and you're along for the ride, and you actually manage to do it. With a story like that, expectations are kept so much lower, and it allows cheesiness and flatness to pass more easily, whereas a story that takes itself seriously like Heat raises expectations and opens itself up to more scrutiny, more obviously exposing its many flaws, while also managing to lose the personality, identity, and atmosphere by going with a bland and predictable structure that we've all seen a thousand times already. Heat also had characters that were either wildly over the top or entirely wooden with no middle ground, leaving everything both unbelievable and uninteresting, while here in 2015, all of the characters are definitely a bit over the top, the performances can be kind of forced, and it's a bit weird that everything always leads to big parties, sure... but these are real enough people. It's believable enough. They're still pretty uninteresting, but hey, can't win 'em all, and I wouldn't expect one dimensional characters to be particularly interesting anyway. The point is this. I actively hated the story in Heat, but the story in this game is serviceable enough that I didn't hate it. Not only that, I actually see some good in it. The characters are actually nice to you, for one thing, and that shouldn't be as rare as it is. The immense push against the story from people online is genuinely confusing to me.
Before moving on to another point, I feel like I should also quickly mention that I still wouldn't call this a good story, just a story with some good qualities. It is the bare minimum. I would love a racing game with an actually good story, and I know that's possible, but they just don't seem to exist for one reason or another, so I'll take what I can get and be grateful that at least the bare minimum is still achieved every now and then. That's not enough for some people, I'm sure, and personally I definitely wish for better, but I have yet to see anybody criticize this game's story on anything beyond the surface level, and I've especially never seen anybody articulate what they think a good racing game story should look like beyond the surface level. That's doubly frustrating when considering that racing game stories tend to actually be nothing more than surface level, where they shouldn't even be considered a significant part of the game and thus should not be part of make-or-break decisions, and yet I've seen so many people doing just that. So I suppose this could be considered a defense of 2015's story, but I'm not defending it for being high quality, I'm defending it for clearing the lowest possible bar. That, and trying to say that there's very little point in even talking about the story of a racing game, let alone making a stink about it, unless it's really good or really awful... despite having just spent six paragraphs on that... hmm.
Anyway, the main reason most non-story-driven games include a story at all is to provide a form of progression. The primary form of progression that (good) racing games typically use is to lock away certain cars and upgrades behind certain points in the game, be it through specific objectives or simply doing enough races, or even to lock away certain races behind other races. Money can also be part of this, obviously. Good news is this game does try to handle progression well by doing all of those things - performance parts locked behind story progression, cosmetic parts locked behind level requirements, and money being in relatively short supply. The bad news is that the disorderly structure of the story in this game does harm the satisfaction of progression a little bit, but most of the damage is done by the level system.
Racing earns you rep, but so does doing pretty much anything, which means you will sometimes level up simply by driving around, and the game shows all of those funny numbers going up constantly at the top of the screen because that's just how all games work now apparently. I don't like numbers games, and as if that wasn't bad enough, there are five other separate counters that go up with different activities - speed, style, crew, outlaw, and build. I barely understand these, and I don't care to learn, because they do absolutely nothing. Literally, they do nothing. They're just numbers that go up for the sake of having numbers that go up. If they were genuinely different leveling systems that unlocked different things, it might have been interesting... although, knowing EA that probably would have been terrible... so as much as I hate the dumb numbers, at least it's not as bad as it could have been I suppose.
I haven't even mentioned how this makes progression worse yet because I've been fixated on hating numbers - and that kind of demonstrates the problem. When you unlock new parts from leveling up, you get a little popup for two seconds in the top left corner, and... that's it. A line of text that comes and goes. There is no satisfaction in progress here, it just happens and that's the end of it. Even the story progression works this way. I spent a lot more time customizing my cars and being frustrated that some things were still locked than I spent thinking about trying to unlock them, or seeking out ways to unlock them, and half the time I didn't even notice when I finally did unlock things. Several cars have very little visual customization available as well, making it feel even less satisfying to unlock stuff, particularly when you unlock something that simply doesn't exist for the car you like.
The satisfaction of the game is harmed in another way as well, being the difficulty. It seems that difficulty in this game is only ever stupid easy or unfair. Races all have a shown difficulty level on them, and anything other than hard is basically impossible to lose, while the level of things that say hard on them can range from "wow they really are always right behind me no matter what huh" all the way to "my car should have double your horsepower, so why did you completely disappear ahead of me in five seconds?" Police chases are also in this game, and they don't really serve any purpose other than to be an obstacle, because even the outlaw path that's specifically about bothering the police doesn't really make them any better. Morohoshi-san is cool though, I like that he's there for that. The police also fall under "stupid easy" in terms of difficulty, reducing them from an obstacle to a mere nuisance.
So if the racing isn't good and the police aren't fun and the driving is questionable, why do I like the game?
It all comes back to personality, identity, and atmosphere. The atmosphere of this game is good enough that I don't need to be challenged to have fun with it, and even though the police chases aren't very engaging, the police presence actually helps with the atmosphere. Police in this game do one thing better than any other street racing game I've ever played... they wait for you. You'll find them cruising around sometimes, looking for racers to chase, but you'll also find them parked on corners or just off the road, waiting for racers to come to them. If you see them before they see you, you can slow down and drive normally for a bit, and they'll ignore you. If you speed or drift or do a burnout in front of them, the chase is on, and they usually call out your specific car over the bullhorn and tell you to stop. It's still a far cry from the visceral nature of the Black Box police, but it feels a lot more personal in this game, and dare I say it, immersive. Just don't expect the chase to last more than two seconds if you passed a cop too fast, because they absolutely cannot catch you unless you give them a chance yourself... but honestly, for this game, I prefer that. Supposedly you can escape a chase by breaking line of sight, parking somewhere normal, turning your engine off, and letting them drive past you... which is cool if true, but I never bothered.
As much as I hate to do it, I have to praise the online nature of this game for something too, because the one advantage of an always-online racing game is a populated open world, and this game does that concept very well. It tries its best to keep your session populated with a handful of other players at all times, but most importantly, races and police chases are NOT instanced, so they all take place on the same map at the same time. So, just by driving around, you will likely encounter other players speeding by with police on their tail, or a player (or a group of them) doing a race, and of course, players can encounter you in your races and chases too. In all cases, you can interfere with one another if you're not careful, but fortunately, headlights and taillights shine very brightly so it is extremely unlikely that you won't see whatever's in front of you. I really love that concept, I just hate that it isn't optional. Seeing other cars going about their business every so often adds a lot to making the game feel alive, though, and that helped keep things interesting.
Another thing keeping the atmosphere strong is the soundtrack. I've seen some people complain about it and I really don't understand that, because while there are a few songs I'm not particularly into, the soundtrack as a whole is so well selected for this game! It fits the mood perfectly, in all situations, particularly the drum & bass selection. Even the chase music fits the game well, because when the rest of the soundtrack is already high energy, the world around you is as dark as this, and the setting is appropriately scrappy, taking the music away and replacing it with tense ambience actually works, unlike in Heat where the chase soundtrack was just boring. While I was looking at mods, I noticed a few mods that replaced the music with songs from older Need for Speed titles, which actually made me a little upset because I hate seeing blind nostalgia staying so persistent... but it turns out there are already some songs from older games in this one by default! I can't be quite as mad at modders for being nostalgic when the developers were exploiting that nostalgia in the first place, even going so far as to put Eddie and his Skyline from Underground in this game. Heck, since it's already in there, I might as well complain that the song taken from Most Wanted was I am Rock instead of the absolutely objectively factually official Most Wanted theme song, Nine Thou. Maybe Shapeshifter. At least the nostalgia music is only present in the challenge races involving Eddie, which is apparently post-launch content to boot.
And of course, rounding out the praise is the elephant in the room. This is one of the best looking games I've ever seen, and for that matter, might be the very best looking of all realistically-styled racing games. Graphics are far from important to me, they don't influence my decisions and I tend not to talk about them in general, but the phenomenal look of this game is definitely worth praising. I'm not a fan of the screen flashes that happen at the end of races and when the police start chasing, and the fog is a little bit much at times, particularly around the bright yellow streetlights that cause the whole screen to get a little brighter and dimmer while driving past them because of the fog... but that's all I've got. There is nothing else I can complain about graphically. Just looking at this game is enjoyable for me, which is impressive enough as it is, but the particular style on display here also plays perfectly into the atmosphere of the game, especially in certain areas of the map where it all comes together beautifully.
This photo is Heat's whole aesthetic done right.
The UI is also excellent, except for the fact that the tachometer starts flashing red 1500 rpm too soon when manual gears are enabled, and the whole numbers thing I complained about already. It's minimal, and half of it is actually part of the world rather than being tacked to one of the screen corners, which is always nice to see. I'm also a big bloom hater, and yet despite having a whole lot of intense bloom, I don't hate it in this game. And speaking of not hating things, here's the craziest part... I even like the motion blur. This is the only game I can think of that does motion blur really well, because it genuinely adds a lot to the sense of speed in the game while also being mostly localized to the screen edges and less important game elements rather than the entire screen. But not everything is so great, I mentioned earlier that I modded out the raindrop effect on the screen because I found it annoying, and I wish there were mods available to remove the screen flashes too - those may just be annoying to me, but they can be dangerous to some - but instead I found several graphical mods that remove all the good stuff. Fog remover, rain remover, daytime mode, reflection changer, a mod that changes the lighting to look more like Heat (which I would call a total downgrade), even a mod to remove the film grain effect because apparently that's intolerable.
This post is far too long, so whatever else I could say I will instead leave unsaid, it's not important... though with my particular interest in sound design, I should probably at least mention that I think it's fine. Not great, not bad, just fine, no complaints aside from the very low default volume requiring me to edit a settings file to raise it to 320% for a reasonable level.
The conclusion, then, is that I like this game. Like the sound design, it is also not great, but it's (likely) the best game Ghost could have made, because after the addition of that handling mod, it's definitely not bad... it's just fine. Acceptable. The title of this thing may be a question, but I already know the answer, because the default handling is bad, and that is a massive blow for any racing game, so I fully understand the backlash against it on that front... just not on any other front. It has style. There is a feeling to this game that makes me want to play more of it. It kept me entertained, I was never bored, and it didn't overstay its welcome. I'm glad I got the chance to play this game after all.
For a genre 15 years behind the rest of the industry, I hugely appreciate the attempt to at least deliver a good modernized version of what once was, rather than repeated "innovation" in the wrong direction (see: NFS Heat) or abandoning style entirely (see: Forza). I hope desperately that in the absence of something truly unique finally gracing the genre at this scale outside of the small indie scene, someone at least tries this again and finds more success... preferably without an always-online requirement.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/why-did-you-hate-need-for-speed-2015-again/)
But something strange happened with the release of Unbound. I actually saw criticism happening - reasonable criticism. For the first time in I don't even know how long, I saw the racing game cult being (mostly) reasonable on the internet. The game was not mindlessly praised nor mindlessly hated, it was instead discussed with a degree of nuance, analyzed on a level beyond graphics, and compared to other games that people felt did some things better or worse... mostly. One of the games I saw it compared against was Need for Speed 2015... and that's the first time I saw 2015 portrayed in a positive light by someone with something of substance to say. That got me curious. Lo and behold, a treasure trove of retrospective praise I did find, numerous people looking back on 2015 and claiming that this was, in fact, the best Need for Speed game made by Ghost, coming from people who panned it on release. Some of these claims seemed as hyperbolic as ever, but plenty were thoughtful and relatively balanced. That made me want to see for myself... but, you know, EA bad and also always-online bad, so no dice. I had already gone so long without ever touching it anyway, so it wasn't difficult to resign myself to the thought that I would lose my chance to play this game, since it will likely disappear for a very long time, if not forever, when EA shuts down the servers.
Then I got the game for free. When faced with the opportunity to play a game that has an expiration date despite being unwilling to pay for it, I ain't saying no.
My immediate first impressions were as follows:
- "Wow, this game looks phenomenal."
- "Wow, this controller support sure is broken."
- "Wow, this handling sure feels wrong."
- "What do you MEAN seven speed Honda Civic???"
I had positive thoughts too, but let's save the positive stuff for later. First I want to talk about the handling, but before I do, I want to quickly mention the thing about the controller support. This game does have remappable controls, which is good, that's the bare minimum that no other Need for Speed game since has met. However... part of me wonders if this game is the reason the future ones don't have that feature. Controller support on the PC version is flat out broken. If you use anything other than an Xbox controller, good luck, and even then some people apparently have some of the same problems with those. I use a Dualshock 4, factually the best controller, and the game detected it twice, both as DInput and XInput, and it confused the controller with my nonexistent racing wheel too, because no matter what I remapped the circle button to, it only ever opened the phone. The solution? Unmap every single control for both the keyboard and the racing wheel, then reset all control profiles to default, then download some random person's actual settings file and replace mine with that one. Baffling issues... and they just left them in there. Never fixed. Did they not know how? Did they drop remappable controls from future games because they would rather give up than figure out how to fix whatever was wrong here? Who knows, none of it makes sense from any angle.
Now then, I want to focus on the handling because while it is definitely bad, I don't think it's entirely irredeemable. At times, the car grips well and it feels good, high grip and responsive controls at high speed is exactly what I want from an arcade racer. At other times, the car will enter a drift as I expect it to and hold it the way I want it to, which also feels great, having the ability to drift smoothly and easily is another great thing for arcade racers to deliver. The problem is that these times are rare. Most of the time, the car understeers heavily, oversteers heavily, or does both at the same time, and when any of those things happen, it bleeds off speed ridiculously fast, to the point that I once dropped from 150 to 140 miles per hour in about half a second with nothing but the lightest nudge on the stick to take an extremely shallow turn while going downhill.
Making things worse is that unless you want to drift all the time, tuning doesn't help, because it turns out grip is entirely unviable and only ever leads to severe understeer, and therefore severely slow cars. Tuning for drift isn't simple either though, because anything other than the perfect sweet spot of settings will result in a car that either hesitates to drift and ends up in the outside walls, or one that turns in way too hard and fast and ends up in the inside walls. Worse still is how inconsistent the handling is, because sometimes the car will grip, maybe it will drift, maybe it will spin, maybe it will understeer directly into the wall, maybe it won't respond at all, and any of these things could happen under the same conditions on the same corner seemingly at random.
By far the most egregious problem, however, is the unpredictability of simply driving in a straight line. Numerous times, I found myself suddenly taking a hard right turn without touching the left stick. All I did was shift up a gear, and that caused a hard right turn, time and time again. I ended up trying a little stress test to see how unpredictable things could get by quickly and repeatedly shifting up and down while driving straight, and also while slightly swerving with light touches on the left stick, and in both cases my car would frequently but randomly fling itself wildly off the road. Sometimes the game broke so badly that my car would jerk to the left while simultaneously starting a drift to the right, and by continuing to shift up and down while that happened, I could make the car drive (nearly) straight while at a 45 degree angle. It's incomprehensible. It feels like a worse version of the drifting from ProStreet, but all the time. This happened in the Civic, but I wanted to see how a rear wheel drive car acted with this model so I bought an RX7 as soon as possible because of course that's what I'd buy, and surprise surprise, it is orders of magnitude worse in a rear wheel drive car.
I had a lot more patience with Heat. The handling in that game was at least serviceable, so I could finish the game without mods. But this? I can't tolerate it. After only a few hours of play, I had to install a handling mod. While looking for that, I also found a mod for gear ratios and RPM for some cars, so I grabbed that one too since a Civic with seven gears is just too silly and I don't even want to know what other silliness lies in wait. And I found a mod that removes the raindrop effect on the screen, so I grabbed that too because that effect was my only real gripe with the visuals that could be modded out. And an intro video remover because the unskippable intro was annoying. The way to actually use these mods is most definitely the worst modding experience I've ever had, because Frosty Mod Manager is a putrid piece of software that barely works when it's in a good mood, and troubleshooting it is basically impossible since it seems like nobody even knows how it works at all and the developers even disabled the issues tab on their GitHub repo - and I remember the days of manually editing the contents of the Minecraft JAR file, that was preferable to this. And with what these mods actually do, and how FMM simply creates symlinks in the game directory, I really don't understand why we can't just drag and drop mod files into a mod folder and load them with a DLL or something. Instead, we get mods that only work with this one program and nothing else for no good reason, and the endless joy of not knowing what's happening or how to fix it when the mods stop loading even though nothing changed. Anyway, mini rant aside, those last three are minor enough changes that I wouldn't say they affect my thoughts on the game itself at all, but the handling mod is definitely a big change and I recognize that the game I'm playing is no longer the same game that Ghost made, but...
I like it. Quite a lot, actually. The whole game, not just the handling mod.
So before I get into the rest of the game, let me finish up the handling topic real quick. The mod I installed isn't perfect either, but it also changes very little. This isn't a physics overhaul at all, it's simply a slight modification to the way grip works, a few changed values including a gigantic nerf to the brake-to-drift system that also makes it possible to adjust how sensitive it is, and a couple different tuning sliders to make it theoretically easier to find that sweet spot that the cars still need. The result of these minor changes is, above all else, consistency. Grip tunes handle much more like I expected them to without any unpredictable quirks, understeer is dramatically reduced (though it is still disappointingly intense), oversteer is less punishing and doesn't immediately switch you into drift mode anymore, both understeer and oversteer punish your speed much less... it's still not what I'd most like, but it feels like what the developers intended. Drift, meanwhile, is also a lot more consistent thanks to the different handling for drifting being less different now, so entering and exiting drift happens much smoother and it's much easier to hold a drift as one would expect to be able to do... albeit still not ideal, as some of the problems (like a delay between when a small drift stops and the car becomes controllable again) would require a total overhaul that's outside the scope of this mod. This, too, is still not my favorite, but it feels like what the developers intended.
The key to good driving remains to be finding the sweet spot in tuning, and if you accept the game for what it is and try to play into its strengths rather than fight against its shortcomings, that sweet spot involves high speed low angle drifting. The lower the angle, the better, because that's what feels the fastest, whether or not it actually is. Even just a few degrees of angle, so little that it almost looks like a regular slip angle expected in grip driving, is enough to keep the car going fast through a corner as long as the game thinks you're drifting, and as much as I hated brake-to-drift in Heat and still have a strong distaste for the concept when the handbrake button is right there, using it with this mod is how to make the driving in this game shine. By adjusting the brake-to-drift threshold and finding the low angle sweet spot of the car, you can achieve an almost normal driving experience by essentially tricking the game. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to achieve this, which led me to stick with just my NSX for a very long time, with the Civic and the Corolla as backups for certain things. Everything else I tried didn't work out quickly enough for me to want to keep them around. Fortunately, I like the NSX a lot and it was a lot of fun to drive the whole time since that's the car where I really felt the handling model clicked with me. I was never bored.
The base handling model of this game is unequivocally worse than Heat as a whole, but in parts, the bones of something better than Heat were in there, and this mod simply brings those parts out. Without this mod, the good moments with both grip and drift handling were very rare, but with the mod installed, they're normalized. All of the same problems from the unmodded game are still present, but those inconsistencies are now rare rather than constant. Unfortunately for me and my preferences, drifting is still the fastest way around almost every corner... but that's clearly what the developers intended, so I can't be too mad about it. All in all, this mod polishes up the existing handling model into something much closer to what it should have been from the start: Arcade handling done decently. It could absolutely be better than this, but it doesn't have to be, it's good enough like this. I may prefer grip over drift, because I miss the days where arcade racers were ridiculously fast and the cars had more grip than F1 cars, but you know what I miss more than that? Arcade racers, period. This game with this mod scratches that itch better than most things in recent memory.
You know something else a lot of arcade racers used to have in The Before Times? Stories. Need for Speed itself used to have stories, like every single game Black Box made. This game also has a story, and that is the one point I still see nothing but disdain for online, both past and present. The vast majority of complaining about it I see boils down to only two points, though... "it's cringe" and "it's forgettable." Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but... I think if you enjoyed the story from any of the Black Box need for speed games on any level, you're not allowed to have a problem with this game's story unless you can both explain your problem in fine detail, and acknowledge that the old games had the same problems. Yes, the story is extremely cheesy and forgettable, but you know what else it is? A perfect product of its time. Just like the Black Box games were, on both counts.
The people calling the story "cringe" are mostly the same old heads that played the Black Box games when they were kids and hold onto their nostalgia with militant fervor that only Pokemon fans can match, kids that don't know how to have their own opinions yet, and teenagers whose opinions on anything are automatically disqualified. As for memorability, the only reason the Black Box games are seen as memorable is because everyone either played them as kids so they made a stronger impression, or played them for the first time today and reveled in the cheese of a bygone era, because what's cheesy and forgettable one year tends to become charming and memorable years later. Give it another ten years and I'm fully confident that the same exact situation will play out with this game, where the ones who played it as kids remember it well and look back on it fondly, and... well, nobody will be able to play it for the first time after that long, so scratch that I guess. Is it good? No, but is that a surprise? None of the other Need for Speed stories were good either, and that's not a problem. This shouldn't even be a talking point, but here we are.
Personally, I only have two main issues with the story. First is the first person point of view in the cutscenes, because the actors sometimes get way too close to the camera and that makes me uncomfortable. Still nowhere near as bad as Undercover, at least. The other problem, or in other words, the real problem I have with the story is that it isn't just non-linear, it's all over the place. There is no real path of progression to follow, because there are instead five separate paths that are all happening at the same time, and the primary presentation of these stories is through phone conversations that happen pretty much all the time. I could be in the middle of a race and get three different phone calls before the finish line, all inviting me to a different race. I wish things happened a bit slower. Less phone calls and texts happening all the time, and less things happening simultaneously. Even if the story paths remained completely unchanged, I think I'd enjoy them more if the game only gave you one at a time. Being non-linear is fine, let the player switch to another path whenever they want, I don't mind that, I just wish the game would stay on one path until the player chooses otherwise. The Black Box need for speed games had the opposite problem, where the story progression in those games was extremely slow. What I really want is the middle ground, but I have yet to find that middle ground in any racing game from the last decade.
I'm not going to just leave it at that, though. I think the story actually has something worth praising. Unfathomable, I know. There is one thing that the story of this game does very, very well... and that is creating an atmosphere. Yes, plenty of the dialogue is very "hello there fellow kids" in nature, but it's not hard to look past that and realize that there is actually a direction here. It's not a soulless corporatized husk of a game like Forza Horizon, and the whole "influencer" """style""" that so many games (especially racing games) lean into lately is nowhere to be found here, and quite frankly, considering that not only does this game attempt a fake social media thing on some screens to try and add character, but Ken Block is literally in the game and a character actually tries to show you one of his videos on their phone in a cutscene... it's downright impressive that the whole fans/followers/whatever thing isn't part of this. This game has a personality, it has an identity, and it has atmosphere. All three of those things are extremely important aspects for a good arcade racer, and they're also the things that so, so many games in recent years struggle with, including Heat, a game that got far less attention for its bad story despite it being so much worse than this. But even if you discount everything I just said as praise about the story in this game, it still stands much stronger than the story in Heat for one simple reason: Sincerity.
The story in Heat felt like an overcorrection, like EA saw the backlash to the story of 2015 and forced Heat's story to get serious'd up, which ended up turning it into a cookie cutter high stakes serious story that takes itself seriously... meanwhile in 2015, there are no stakes. It's lighthearted. It's just a bunch of car nuts sincerely wanting to impress the people they look up to, and you're along for the ride, and you actually manage to do it. With a story like that, expectations are kept so much lower, and it allows cheesiness and flatness to pass more easily, whereas a story that takes itself seriously like Heat raises expectations and opens itself up to more scrutiny, more obviously exposing its many flaws, while also managing to lose the personality, identity, and atmosphere by going with a bland and predictable structure that we've all seen a thousand times already. Heat also had characters that were either wildly over the top or entirely wooden with no middle ground, leaving everything both unbelievable and uninteresting, while here in 2015, all of the characters are definitely a bit over the top, the performances can be kind of forced, and it's a bit weird that everything always leads to big parties, sure... but these are real enough people. It's believable enough. They're still pretty uninteresting, but hey, can't win 'em all, and I wouldn't expect one dimensional characters to be particularly interesting anyway. The point is this. I actively hated the story in Heat, but the story in this game is serviceable enough that I didn't hate it. Not only that, I actually see some good in it. The characters are actually nice to you, for one thing, and that shouldn't be as rare as it is. The immense push against the story from people online is genuinely confusing to me.
Before moving on to another point, I feel like I should also quickly mention that I still wouldn't call this a good story, just a story with some good qualities. It is the bare minimum. I would love a racing game with an actually good story, and I know that's possible, but they just don't seem to exist for one reason or another, so I'll take what I can get and be grateful that at least the bare minimum is still achieved every now and then. That's not enough for some people, I'm sure, and personally I definitely wish for better, but I have yet to see anybody criticize this game's story on anything beyond the surface level, and I've especially never seen anybody articulate what they think a good racing game story should look like beyond the surface level. That's doubly frustrating when considering that racing game stories tend to actually be nothing more than surface level, where they shouldn't even be considered a significant part of the game and thus should not be part of make-or-break decisions, and yet I've seen so many people doing just that. So I suppose this could be considered a defense of 2015's story, but I'm not defending it for being high quality, I'm defending it for clearing the lowest possible bar. That, and trying to say that there's very little point in even talking about the story of a racing game, let alone making a stink about it, unless it's really good or really awful... despite having just spent six paragraphs on that... hmm.
Anyway, the main reason most non-story-driven games include a story at all is to provide a form of progression. The primary form of progression that (good) racing games typically use is to lock away certain cars and upgrades behind certain points in the game, be it through specific objectives or simply doing enough races, or even to lock away certain races behind other races. Money can also be part of this, obviously. Good news is this game does try to handle progression well by doing all of those things - performance parts locked behind story progression, cosmetic parts locked behind level requirements, and money being in relatively short supply. The bad news is that the disorderly structure of the story in this game does harm the satisfaction of progression a little bit, but most of the damage is done by the level system.
Racing earns you rep, but so does doing pretty much anything, which means you will sometimes level up simply by driving around, and the game shows all of those funny numbers going up constantly at the top of the screen because that's just how all games work now apparently. I don't like numbers games, and as if that wasn't bad enough, there are five other separate counters that go up with different activities - speed, style, crew, outlaw, and build. I barely understand these, and I don't care to learn, because they do absolutely nothing. Literally, they do nothing. They're just numbers that go up for the sake of having numbers that go up. If they were genuinely different leveling systems that unlocked different things, it might have been interesting... although, knowing EA that probably would have been terrible... so as much as I hate the dumb numbers, at least it's not as bad as it could have been I suppose.
I haven't even mentioned how this makes progression worse yet because I've been fixated on hating numbers - and that kind of demonstrates the problem. When you unlock new parts from leveling up, you get a little popup for two seconds in the top left corner, and... that's it. A line of text that comes and goes. There is no satisfaction in progress here, it just happens and that's the end of it. Even the story progression works this way. I spent a lot more time customizing my cars and being frustrated that some things were still locked than I spent thinking about trying to unlock them, or seeking out ways to unlock them, and half the time I didn't even notice when I finally did unlock things. Several cars have very little visual customization available as well, making it feel even less satisfying to unlock stuff, particularly when you unlock something that simply doesn't exist for the car you like.
The satisfaction of the game is harmed in another way as well, being the difficulty. It seems that difficulty in this game is only ever stupid easy or unfair. Races all have a shown difficulty level on them, and anything other than hard is basically impossible to lose, while the level of things that say hard on them can range from "wow they really are always right behind me no matter what huh" all the way to "my car should have double your horsepower, so why did you completely disappear ahead of me in five seconds?" Police chases are also in this game, and they don't really serve any purpose other than to be an obstacle, because even the outlaw path that's specifically about bothering the police doesn't really make them any better. Morohoshi-san is cool though, I like that he's there for that. The police also fall under "stupid easy" in terms of difficulty, reducing them from an obstacle to a mere nuisance.
So if the racing isn't good and the police aren't fun and the driving is questionable, why do I like the game?
It all comes back to personality, identity, and atmosphere. The atmosphere of this game is good enough that I don't need to be challenged to have fun with it, and even though the police chases aren't very engaging, the police presence actually helps with the atmosphere. Police in this game do one thing better than any other street racing game I've ever played... they wait for you. You'll find them cruising around sometimes, looking for racers to chase, but you'll also find them parked on corners or just off the road, waiting for racers to come to them. If you see them before they see you, you can slow down and drive normally for a bit, and they'll ignore you. If you speed or drift or do a burnout in front of them, the chase is on, and they usually call out your specific car over the bullhorn and tell you to stop. It's still a far cry from the visceral nature of the Black Box police, but it feels a lot more personal in this game, and dare I say it, immersive. Just don't expect the chase to last more than two seconds if you passed a cop too fast, because they absolutely cannot catch you unless you give them a chance yourself... but honestly, for this game, I prefer that. Supposedly you can escape a chase by breaking line of sight, parking somewhere normal, turning your engine off, and letting them drive past you... which is cool if true, but I never bothered.
As much as I hate to do it, I have to praise the online nature of this game for something too, because the one advantage of an always-online racing game is a populated open world, and this game does that concept very well. It tries its best to keep your session populated with a handful of other players at all times, but most importantly, races and police chases are NOT instanced, so they all take place on the same map at the same time. So, just by driving around, you will likely encounter other players speeding by with police on their tail, or a player (or a group of them) doing a race, and of course, players can encounter you in your races and chases too. In all cases, you can interfere with one another if you're not careful, but fortunately, headlights and taillights shine very brightly so it is extremely unlikely that you won't see whatever's in front of you. I really love that concept, I just hate that it isn't optional. Seeing other cars going about their business every so often adds a lot to making the game feel alive, though, and that helped keep things interesting.
Another thing keeping the atmosphere strong is the soundtrack. I've seen some people complain about it and I really don't understand that, because while there are a few songs I'm not particularly into, the soundtrack as a whole is so well selected for this game! It fits the mood perfectly, in all situations, particularly the drum & bass selection. Even the chase music fits the game well, because when the rest of the soundtrack is already high energy, the world around you is as dark as this, and the setting is appropriately scrappy, taking the music away and replacing it with tense ambience actually works, unlike in Heat where the chase soundtrack was just boring. While I was looking at mods, I noticed a few mods that replaced the music with songs from older Need for Speed titles, which actually made me a little upset because I hate seeing blind nostalgia staying so persistent... but it turns out there are already some songs from older games in this one by default! I can't be quite as mad at modders for being nostalgic when the developers were exploiting that nostalgia in the first place, even going so far as to put Eddie and his Skyline from Underground in this game. Heck, since it's already in there, I might as well complain that the song taken from Most Wanted was I am Rock instead of the absolutely objectively factually official Most Wanted theme song, Nine Thou. Maybe Shapeshifter. At least the nostalgia music is only present in the challenge races involving Eddie, which is apparently post-launch content to boot.
And of course, rounding out the praise is the elephant in the room. This is one of the best looking games I've ever seen, and for that matter, might be the very best looking of all realistically-styled racing games. Graphics are far from important to me, they don't influence my decisions and I tend not to talk about them in general, but the phenomenal look of this game is definitely worth praising. I'm not a fan of the screen flashes that happen at the end of races and when the police start chasing, and the fog is a little bit much at times, particularly around the bright yellow streetlights that cause the whole screen to get a little brighter and dimmer while driving past them because of the fog... but that's all I've got. There is nothing else I can complain about graphically. Just looking at this game is enjoyable for me, which is impressive enough as it is, but the particular style on display here also plays perfectly into the atmosphere of the game, especially in certain areas of the map where it all comes together beautifully.
This photo is Heat's whole aesthetic done right.
The UI is also excellent, except for the fact that the tachometer starts flashing red 1500 rpm too soon when manual gears are enabled, and the whole numbers thing I complained about already. It's minimal, and half of it is actually part of the world rather than being tacked to one of the screen corners, which is always nice to see. I'm also a big bloom hater, and yet despite having a whole lot of intense bloom, I don't hate it in this game. And speaking of not hating things, here's the craziest part... I even like the motion blur. This is the only game I can think of that does motion blur really well, because it genuinely adds a lot to the sense of speed in the game while also being mostly localized to the screen edges and less important game elements rather than the entire screen. But not everything is so great, I mentioned earlier that I modded out the raindrop effect on the screen because I found it annoying, and I wish there were mods available to remove the screen flashes too - those may just be annoying to me, but they can be dangerous to some - but instead I found several graphical mods that remove all the good stuff. Fog remover, rain remover, daytime mode, reflection changer, a mod that changes the lighting to look more like Heat (which I would call a total downgrade), even a mod to remove the film grain effect because apparently that's intolerable.
This post is far too long, so whatever else I could say I will instead leave unsaid, it's not important... though with my particular interest in sound design, I should probably at least mention that I think it's fine. Not great, not bad, just fine, no complaints aside from the very low default volume requiring me to edit a settings file to raise it to 320% for a reasonable level.
The conclusion, then, is that I like this game. Like the sound design, it is also not great, but it's (likely) the best game Ghost could have made, because after the addition of that handling mod, it's definitely not bad... it's just fine. Acceptable. The title of this thing may be a question, but I already know the answer, because the default handling is bad, and that is a massive blow for any racing game, so I fully understand the backlash against it on that front... just not on any other front. It has style. There is a feeling to this game that makes me want to play more of it. It kept me entertained, I was never bored, and it didn't overstay its welcome. I'm glad I got the chance to play this game after all.
For a genre 15 years behind the rest of the industry, I hugely appreciate the attempt to at least deliver a good modernized version of what once was, rather than repeated "innovation" in the wrong direction (see: NFS Heat) or abandoning style entirely (see: Forza). I hope desperately that in the absence of something truly unique finally gracing the genre at this scale outside of the small indie scene, someone at least tries this again and finds more success... preferably without an always-online requirement.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/why-did-you-hate-need-for-speed-2015-again/)