DAW SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET
The vibes in this game go hard, I want to live in this 2003-ass city of perpetual nighttime. Everything is well lit and rendered, there's a copious amount of 6th-gen motion blur everywhere when you go fast, but things still manage to be (for the most part) readable. The OST is a bit hit-and-miss though, I like the dumpy menu music beats but the race music being more 2000s edgy emo type vibes was kinda unfitting to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big sucker for that stuff, and it also serves to solidify this game as an excellent time piece, but it seems more fitting for daytime racing than underground nighttime racing. I associate night vibes with like techno-y D'n'B-y adrenaline vibes and not hard guitars and edge I guess, but that's probably more of a me thing. Despite all that, the vibes this game has are my jam, love this kinda shit. I haven't seen any of the fast and furious movies, but I have heard that this games aesthetic is borrowed heavily from em so I might have to give em a watch.
On the game front though, this game is a bit hrmmm. 112 events to do is kinda exhausting, and the AI has that classic need for speed rubberbanding. It reminded me of playing NFS2, where you could run a perfect race and fuck up on the last turn and everything would be for naught. The weighty momentum-y feel of the cars plus the aggressive rubberbanding and decent amounts of traffic means the lategame is really frustrating, as fuckups are easy and will ruin your race many, MANY times. Nerfing your car and setting the difficulty to easy can mitigate a bit of the AI problems, but at the end of the day the events still end up feeling like a bit of RNG, where you just gotta keep retryin over and over again until the game feels generous enough to let you win. There are other non-racey events like drift point challenges which are fun and these weird drag race minigames that are less fun and are more just memorization of where traffic spawns to avoid.
It's a decent tonal shift of the NFS series while keeping the same style of gameplay, and I've heard Underground 2 is where the wheels really start turning so it's probably better to play that instead if you want your early 2000s night city racing fix.
The vibes in this game go hard, I want to live in this 2003-ass city of perpetual nighttime. Everything is well lit and rendered, there's a copious amount of 6th-gen motion blur everywhere when you go fast, but things still manage to be (for the most part) readable. The OST is a bit hit-and-miss though, I like the dumpy menu music beats but the race music being more 2000s edgy emo type vibes was kinda unfitting to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big sucker for that stuff, and it also serves to solidify this game as an excellent time piece, but it seems more fitting for daytime racing than underground nighttime racing. I associate night vibes with like techno-y D'n'B-y adrenaline vibes and not hard guitars and edge I guess, but that's probably more of a me thing. Despite all that, the vibes this game has are my jam, love this kinda shit. I haven't seen any of the fast and furious movies, but I have heard that this games aesthetic is borrowed heavily from em so I might have to give em a watch.
On the game front though, this game is a bit hrmmm. 112 events to do is kinda exhausting, and the AI has that classic need for speed rubberbanding. It reminded me of playing NFS2, where you could run a perfect race and fuck up on the last turn and everything would be for naught. The weighty momentum-y feel of the cars plus the aggressive rubberbanding and decent amounts of traffic means the lategame is really frustrating, as fuckups are easy and will ruin your race many, MANY times. Nerfing your car and setting the difficulty to easy can mitigate a bit of the AI problems, but at the end of the day the events still end up feeling like a bit of RNG, where you just gotta keep retryin over and over again until the game feels generous enough to let you win. There are other non-racey events like drift point challenges which are fun and these weird drag race minigames that are less fun and are more just memorization of where traffic spawns to avoid.
It's a decent tonal shift of the NFS series while keeping the same style of gameplay, and I've heard Underground 2 is where the wheels really start turning so it's probably better to play that instead if you want your early 2000s night city racing fix.