My personal review about Heat

So hello everyone, I might be just some random but I'd still love to take the time to bring another review of the game. I've been playing most of the NFS since Porsche 2000 and followed the way the game has evolved until Payback and now Heat.

Well from my point of view I don't consider playing a new game anymore but rather a sort of major update compared to the previous games, as Payback was a big update of NFS 2015 and Heat is a big update of Payback. However, where Payback was a rather successful update of NFS 2015 (don't get me wrong, 2015 was not good but Payback was a ton of good evolutions... done totally wrong, which is why I still consider it successful for the effort put it in, but not for the result) Heat feels like a stagnation, many adjustments but nothing seems better than before... if not worse. Some stuff has been totally abandonned (where is the online???) and some other stuff have been unecessarily changed (drifting gameplay???)

fortunately there are still good points to remember and this is what i'm gonna begin with:

1) Cops: Some people may still dislike the weakness of the cops (and they would be right) but for the first time since Most Wanted (the real one) I finally felt pressure from getting pursued by them. Sadly the pressure collapses as soon as you get a powerful car. But still there was a big improvement on them, finally using proper tricks to stop you. I will explain below the issue I got with them.

2) Damage gauge: It brings back some difficulty, unseen since Hot Pursuit 2010. But it's not used the right way, explainations below aswell.

3) No more level limited cars: I think NFS has been nuff criticized for that, it was quite obvious that the mistake wouldn't be done again. Plus good point on the work done on the performance parts that shapes the use you want to do of your car.

4) Good optimization (but not perfect!): So yeah the optimization is rather great considering every single small lost rock at the edge of the map is destructible. But even on a machine using a 2070 Super and a 7600K OCed 4,8 Ghz I still get major FPS drops sometimes. (from constant 90~100fps to 45 @ 1440p).

5) Night and Day: NFS has to cover both of those right now, and it should be that way for the next games imo.

and sadly that's pretty much all for the good points... how about we open the salt box now :D

1) Cops! I had to consider the improvement done on them, but that's still far from being enough! Ok now they use small tactics but they're not even agressive! You get a max of 4 cars behind you while 2 of them are too slow to keep up the race, the helicopter is nearly useless as soon as you know where to go for him to go away and the harrows... that's surely the cherry on the cake these are so useless, being always set on side roads you're not going.

2) Damage gauge: Here again I had to mention the good point of bringing it back, but it could have been used better! The cops are not agressive yet they are destructible, but when you do that you inflict yourself some damages. You could have spiced up the game by making more agressive cops, more cars pursuing you but when you hit them you don't auto inflict damages to yourself. That'd have made more intense pursuits and fights (just like the takedowns from Most Wanted 2012).

3) Not so much content evolution: copy past on the cars, copy past on the customization parts... I think the customization is the most visible point that explains why I said newer NFS games were more updates from 2015 than proper games. Still a good range of cars but many are similar, could have made roadster versions modifiable in the customization instead of adding it as a car.

4) The Story: Here again people may dislike it but for me it was better than Payback. A minimalist story yet efficient, but it could have been further, it was way too short again. So yea it's a racing game and doing a story for a game like that is quite difficult, but it's possible to do it without turning your game into an interractive movie: Underground 2 and Most Wanted were the two most popular games of the franchise and their stories were the reason why. The story was long, well built and you were still playing a racing game. Why don't you do that again?

5) Drifting gameplay: I don't know how I should feel about it, drifting at high speed has been made quite difficult (mostly due to changing the drift from braking to accelerating), it brings some difficult and makes the game a bit more technique demanding where it was maybe too much arcade before. You can still set the drifting to brakes again in the quick settings but it's nearly useless because the car still wouldn't drift unless you brake, accelerate and brake again afterwards, the handling is way too long and you got plenty of time to go off the road. So yeah the gameplay is harder but it felt less enjoyable than a MW 2012 or Payback imo.

6) Nitro gameplay: The point of the nitro was to compensate for the time lost in driving mistakes, it was really useful to be able to use it the way you wanted it, the way it's been changed into using the whole bottle at once also makes the gameplay less enjoyable, no matter how many bottles you got.

7) No text chat...: 2020 and after 26 years of Need For Speed, still no damn text chat. Is it that hard to make? How do you want to make an online alive if people cannot communicate... and no, not everyone has microphones nor wants to talk (not even talking about the * codecs that results a voice sound coming from the deep toilets...)

8) The map: I just don't like it. The city part is great but surely too small, rest of the map are annoying mountains. The map feels smaller than in Payback (I didn't verify though but that's the feeling I had).

9) Too much traffic: which is normal in the city, but in the mountains it's just absurd. You got plenty of roads made to go all the way to max speed but you get a goddamn car every corner, and every time you want to dodge one, you get another coming upfront, how annoying...

10) Weather: Raining with a clear blue sky is really possible? Seeing the whole stars in the sky at night in the middle of a city is really possible? Not sure...

11) Koenigsegg Regera: It makes no sense to mention it since the online is just inexistent, but seriously guys, are you paid by Konigsegg to make all its stats OP as *?

12) Destructibles: I don't know how much work it demanded to do it, but it's completely useless. It literally burns our CPUs and breaks the game experience by causing major FPS drops even on powerful computers.

13) ... Where is the online???: I think this is the most disapointing into all the bad points of this game. Payback's online was absolutely awful because despite all the good ideas brought in, it was done so totally wrong that it ended up being one of my most hated games of all time. Payback's online was awful and so I was expecting literally a lot from Heat, the recipe would have been so simple... Get good races again, remove that idiotic multiplier in drifting challenges, improve crossover's gameplay, nerf that stupid Regera... really it was so simple to make a good online, but instead of fixing stuff, you've totally removed it? just WTF? This online is so useless and inactive, did you seriously think people would play it? like setting a race and waiting for people to join? Without the possibility to call in a text chat? Who the heck worked on this... guys I had so much fun in MW 2012's Speedlists, was it that complicated to copy past that system again as you do it so good for the rest of the game content? I'm just glad I haven't paid the full price for that game again because you just don't deserve it.

Conclusion: Soooo many bad points from my side, yet I would still consider Heat as an improvement compared to Payback. However the lack of work (is it the result of removing the loot boxes and micro transactions?) literally makes my eyes bleeding especially on the online. Honestly, everything I expected to be improved from payback was on the online, and being there playing something completely empty just made it to the biggest disapointment I ever had in a Need For Speed. I got the game for 30 bucks and it was still too much... what a shame for a game that demands so much financial investment to be made.