One of my fondest gaming memories growing up was sitting by the open window of our apartment with the wind blowing onto my face, my PSP in hand playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted 5-1-0 while blasting music from my MP3 player. I didn’t have many games on the PSP but if I ever had a racing phase, that was it. Most Wanted and Pursuit Force were almost always running on my PSP. Since then, I have had a few hours of playtime in numerous Need for Speed games but I didn’t ever cross their proverbial finish lines. So, when I sat down to figure out what Need for Speed game I wanted to play, my eyes went to the twenty-second game in the series which was released in 2015 and was simply titled Need for Speed. Having spent over 20 hours into the game and securing the Platinum, I wanted to talk about the game and how it represents the best and worst of the iconic racing franchise.
Look, I know that most people don’t play Need for Speed (or most other racing games for that matter) for the story and I tend to feel the same way. I have put dozens of hours into Forza Horizon games without ever finishing the storyline for any of them. But, I played through the entire campaign of Need for Speed (2015) and so I have to talk about it. It used to be that Need for Speed career mode had you completing certain tasks listed by notorious racers to get their attention and NFS (which I will use from now on to refer to the 2015 title specifically) applies that same formula to an open world. Welcome to Ventura Bay, where the cops are idiots, the civilians are even worse, and illegal street racing is all the rage. You play as a faceless/nameless newbie in a group of racing caricatures where stomaching the live-action cutscenes and getting any real value from them while enjoying the game is quite the feat in itself.
Let me explain. The Ventura Bay gang has five people, each with their own racing preference: build, crew, style, speed, and outlaw. As you drive around the nocturnal open world of NFS, you will get calls on your handy dandy cellphone about events to take part in. These specially marked races will progress the story in one of those five categories and with one of those five people. The problem is, unless you do one storyline to completion at a time, which I do not recommend cause of how the game’s difficulty scales as you progress, the story makes the characters sort of bipolar. One second, Spike is in a cutscene getting mad at you and Robyn for hanging out too much, but in the next, he’s all cool and laughing along with everyone else at the diner. It really doesn’t flow and I’m curious how the game was intended to be played for the five narratives to actually mesh together. Of course, I have not even touched on the bold choice to shoot all the cutscenes in first-person live-action, which, with no disrespect to the actors, absolutely did not work for me. I guess I can only be fist bumped and handed a Monster energy drink so many times before I emotionally check out. (Death Stranding being the exemption of course.)
But that’s enough about the story, it’s a racing game so it’s time to talk racing. In regard to the gameplay choices, for every good moment in NFS, there’s a frustrating one to follow. Let’s start with the driving. I am not great at racing games but there’s something about Need for Speed‘s gameplay that works for me. Pulling off crazy drifts down an exit ramp was something not in my wheelhouse of abilities in any other game, but it didn’t take me long to do just that in NFS. The game captures a great sense of speed too and I enjoyed progressing from the starting vehicle to the finely tuned Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 that I was tearing through the streets in by the end of the game. Speaking of tuning, I messed around a bit in the garage to get my cars to play how I wanted, and that trial and error was a fun gameplay loop. I ended up having two cars for drifting and two cars for speed, with the fifth spot reserved for cars you have to get for specific story missions. I am not a car guy, but the mechanics here were simple enough for me to understand and that’s a good thing.
Of course, it can’t all be good, and the frustrating choice that goes along with the gameplay has to do with the game being always online. There are very few games I think need to be always online and this was not one of them. Not just for the fact that you can’t pause while playing, which sucks, but the limited interactions I had with other players as I played the game were not worth the lack of convenience. Yes, occasionally, I’d turn a corner and see a player zoom by with a squad of police cars in pursuit, but I have also had multiple races ruined by the same feature. Another byproduct of an always-online game is that servers can shut down. I actually have a clip on my PlayStation 5 of me about to finish a 60-checkpoint race I had been attempting for a good thirty minutes when the server shut down and kicked me off two checkpoints away from the finish line. Over the few days that I played the game, glued to my chair after food poisoning kicked my ass, I found that the servers “shut down for maintenance” multiple times per day. This really tests your need for returning to the game because after raging at the ridiculous AI for ruining more races than other human players, it takes a certain type of stubbornness to boot the game up again.
What is it about the AI that’s ridiculous? Well, I am not going to call out the fact that every civilian in Ventura Bay is a lunatic for going outside at night at all because of how many street races are going on at any given moment because I remember taxi cabs slowly making their way down the road in Most Wanted 5-1-0 back in the day. However, it would have helped if they weren’t so stupid when they were doing so. The sheer number of times I have crashed into a Hot Wheels branded truck and blew a race is astounding and at such high speeds, even if you manage to swerve out of the way you’ll end up clipping the side of the road and crashing. The real kicker here though is that I’m not alone in this. Other AI racers do the same thing. I found it hilarious when I started a race against Amy and her hero Nakai-San only to watch them immediately plow into a truck in front of me. In Ventura Bay, you live a legend and you die a legend.
My criticism of the AI extends to the police as well, who are pretty easy to outrun and evade. You’ll see them mostly in the outlaw storyline and, other than the spike strips that take out your tires, they really didn’t pose much of a threat. It’s not all bad bad, however. Aggroing the cops and then racing through the streets, pulling off evasive maneuvers until I was out of their line of sight before pulling my car over and turning off the engine to watch as they drove by cluelessly was the closest I think I will ever feel to Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive. And sometimes you can even use the AI to your advantage. For Example, take a mission in the Speed storyline where I had to race Magnus Walker. I had a tough time beating Magnus, even with my top-end car for that point in the game, but to my delight, you can ram cars into accidents and when the objective is to simply “win” the race, you can take your time crossing the finish line when your completion is trying to back out of the pickle you put them in at the first turn. This is a premium winning strategy that I used multiple times in other races that followed. On the flip side of that, the game can also screw you over pretty easily too, sometimes before you’re even in control. When you start a race, the game plays a small cutscene of your car revving up to the starting line, but on more than one occasion, the game put me directly behind a parked vehicle on the side of the road, meaning, by the time I reversed and got back on the road the other racers were gone. Other times they’d have an NPC car crash into mine from the side almost immediately, resulting in a similar delay.
Switching over to a positive, I do like the fact that there’s event diversity thanks to the five characters. If you find yourself stuck on a certain type of race, you can switch to a different one to not get too frustrated. Going along with the garage mechanics point earlier, running a race, and seeing what kind of car tuning you need to do to win was nice trial and error gameplay. That being said, I do wish the game had the ability to pick what car you wanted to enter a race with before you started it like in Forza Horizon. As it is in the game, I had to take out my phone, go back to the garage, pick up the car I wanted, exit the garage, and then drive or fast travel to the race location again. I think that dead time could easily be cut with a car selection feature.
NFS was built using DICE’s Frostbite engine and though the game doesn’t push the engine to its limits, owing to the fact that you drive around Ventura Bay at night and often in the rain, it does look good in those set parameters. Being a “last-gen” title released in 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One along with PC, the game isn’t boasting advanced ray tracing. Yet, the use of light is effective and the rain and puddle effects on the car and road are really well done. To touch on sound briefly, NFS has a soundtrack featuring Pusha T, Kill the Noise, and more. The kinetic music selection lines up with the overall tone of the game, but I think Need for Speed is best when played with your own playlist of curated songs. Which is exactly what I did for most of the game’s playtime. As for the cars, well, they sounded like cars, and the roar of car engines sounded close to the ones that annoyingly speed past my house, so I suppose that has to mean it’s accurate.
Now, because it is August and we’re doing our GW&CO Hunt once again, I can’t end this review without talking about trophies. NFS is quite an easy game to Platinum, with most of the base game trophies being unlocked as you finish the main campaign. I think that shiny trophy is a big part of why I booted up the game again and again when server shutdowns kicked me out and I am glad I did because the best moment in the game is its final one. Once you finish each of the five storylines, Robyn calls you for two final races. The first is with the core Ventura Bay gang and the second is a 100+ checkpoint race around the entire map with the whole named cast. This was a fun way to say goodbye to the game and doing so will earn you the Ultimate Icon title and roll credits. If there are miscellaneous trophies after you finish the game (for me, it was finishing 15 daily challenges) they are easy enough to mop up. And if you’re worried about grinding for REP level 50, I ended up unlocking it on my second to last race so no extra time was needed.
If you can’t tell already, I have a love/hate relationship with the 2015 Need for Speed game. On one hand, it has the same easy-to-learn controls that I remember with an upgrade system that encourages experimentation to fine-tune your cars. But on the other, the decision to make it an always-online game and bad AI hurt the experience. Not to mention that the story is ridiculous with characters that feel more like caricatures of their real-life counterparts than anything else. If you can work past those issues, however, you will find a decent racing game and Platinum trophy waiting for you on the other end. And, as rumors grow about an upcoming Need for Speed game releasing in 2022, I can only hope that the team pushes the game forward not just graphically, but mechanically, because while staying true to the roots is great, I do want to see the series adapt to the market a bit more.
Top ,.. top top … post! Keep the good work on !
Thanks for reading!