No improvements whatsoever: A fan's review
To warn the reader beforehand, this is not a rant, quite the contrary. The game is good, but not good enough for 60-70€. Everything stated can be experienced in the game, if the reader allows themselves to see more profoundly.
To start, the game improves nothing on the predecessor. To corroborate, this is nothing new in the history of this franchise, but then again this should've been a love letter to everyone loving the series and it's really not. HEAT had a lot of options for free roam, races, great replay-value - though reading some comments and threads, lack of content.
Well you get the game you paid for on the day one, I don't understand how do you expect especially EA to update on a "dead game" - whereas the game becomes "dead" on the release date. The only thing that's being fixed are game-breaking bugs, they could've sh*t on our heads if they wanted to. If they add features it's only because they have no current plans on a new game the studio can be shifted to. In other terms, if you don't pay monthly rates for the game (as it is with some MMOs) you literally cannot expect any updates. Paying monthly for the entire publisher's bundle doesn't count, that's just a way to get more money from you without doing more work. Anyway...
The player is guided with annoying, many times pointless dialogs through a painful story to reclaim one's car. Fine, we need story, we got one. It's not particularly good or engaging, but it really sets the scene for the game. The way the story is told, or rather the player is fenced into it, is though very much not ideal. You can free roam, but only during the day, because you will inevitably collect heat during the day and then it transfers over to the night. You cannot clear the heat, at least I did not find a way how, other than ending the entire day. This is so * that I do not have words for it. If you get busted one day (because of the cops[1]), you lose everything and you are unable to rewind the time to fix your failures. To say the least concept is incredibly frustrating and doesn't make me want to come back to play the game (especially because of the cops[1]).
Now that the "heat" problem is established, there are also mechanics that make no sense. Did you try to jump with your car and it suddenly becomes glider which can be turned to either side? Yeah? Well that's stupid. Okay, reader can already tell that's nitpicking, because this is an arcade game yadi yada. Why not attach baloons to the cars and make them fly then. It shouldn't be a simulator, because almost no one playing wants it to be, but basic physics cannot be altered.
That all said, I feel like all the good job Ghost Games did with the driving seemingly got thrown out of the window. It felt arcade and engaging. I personally encountered many instances (in UNBOUND) where at random speeds at random degree curves the car just decides in the 200km/h to do donuts. Personally, wouldn't say that's a bug, that's how somebody somewhere wanted the car to behave. Having all grip setup, TC on, drift triggers turned off, this is just sad.
To add an insult to injury, the car AI didn't improve either. It behaves completely out of tough with reality. Ask yourself this, if you're making a left turn, do you stop mid junction because somebody is going 300km/h on the oncoming?
No, normal driver doesn't look to the left mirror at all, let alone calculate that they need to stop. You're taught in the driving school that you're supposed to exit the junction as fast as humanly possible. I guess many people are not every-day drivers, but it bugs me so deeply being used to these rules, that I cannot fathom how nobody else cares about this, especially the developers.
Same goes obviously for cars entering the junction, they just feel like they should stop in the middle, again to avoid crashes you should get out of there as fast as possible, stopping is slower than speeding up (surprise surprise).
Last but not least in practically all of the races you'll encounter twisty turns which take you from behind a pillar to a junction. AI of the normie driver sees me through the textures and decides to stop 20m before the junction so I can crash. Like at this point if this was a feature I can bring down on my opponents it would feel more real than this.
If - and I guess you do, since you added the pedestrians - you want to make the city more lively, then this is the right step to take. I'm sick of crashing to the trucks waiting for me to pass them on the oncoming.
Obviously the simulation is not quite perfect in adhering to the rules of the road traffic either, cars would casually go across the junctions on the red signal. I honestly admit that this is nit-picking, but the visual cues could help you make better decisions when overtaking the cars or opponents.
I should mention the cartoon graphics which are totally out of place, customization of your character and stuff nobody really cares about but they pretend they do. This is just a design decision, whatever I don't care. You can mostly turn off all the cartoon effects (set it to gray and turn off the wings or whatever it is), would be really nice if I could turn off the tail light lines when you race fast enough, but again design decision, I don't care.
The nitro was really confusing and still is to a large extent. We now have two types of nitros, one of which makes you go faster and the other does literally only visual effects. I didn't experience an occasion where using the yellow nitro bars would make me go significantly faster. Neither it makes my opponents (AIs or not) go significantly faster when racing next to them. It feels like a design decision, but breaks the immersion by making the camera do strange motion without making the car faster. The game fails to explain how to gain the yellow nitro efficiently and what's it good for really. That's just a last minute band-aid somebody made to make the game more appealing in my personal opinion. (please comment how am I wrong and it has some real sense, really)
Looking at the threads here, some people don't like the cops being front and center put out there as a flagship feature.[1] Let's be real, HEAT made it incredibly fun to roam around during the day and completing events, because they were "scheduled and organized". Making it all illegal and slapping cops onto it to increase play-time is absolutely obnoxious. Player is either forced to play on the lowest difficulty to ensure that cops are easy to get rid of, but at the same time you'll overtake all of the cars in the first turn, or just suffer the cops. Would be cool if I could set the cop difficulty separately from the race difficulty, but nobody's apparently thought about that when testing or designing the game systems. I usually drive behind the cops and pray for them to make a turn, so I don't get the chase started...
Shame, I hope the police chases are opt-in only in the next game and if not I will hate the game for it. Ghost Games did it right, Criterion is clueless in what they do.
One other incredible annoyance is that you cannot change the car characteristics (tune handling) during a race (: You can have a car that can drift and can grip, but god forbid you want to change that after unknowingly starting a drift event. Yeah about that, the races are so stupidly categorized, that's incredible. Every race seems like it's a sprint or whatever, then you just jump in without looking (because nobody reads the cards, I hope, only looks at the winnings) and HEY you're doing donuts and you're * with the grip setup, enjoy! Would've been such an easy fix, but noooooo.
The protagonist (your character) says in the menus that you might need multiple cars to finish all events in a day. OH you wanted to finish first in those events and maxed out your primary car that's now on A rating but the events are B. Yeah, tough luck with getting most of the money. Inexplicably B events can be more rewarding in terms of money gained. I DO NOT understand why. I should be pushed to upgrade the car and go beyond, not to be constantly throttled by "BOOHOO there are no events for A+(S/whatever) available" I want to improve my car not to race 20 hours with the complete same setup or buys 40 different cars with different characteristics. End-game was great in HEAT, upgrading cars was fun, this is certainly not.
The entire game could be really fun for first-time players to series, I can admit that. But I have seen better, much much better. As a fan of the series with every copy bought and finished to 100% with every car owned and pimped up, this I will probably not finish. Sad concept art, carbon copy of old mechanics without improving on any of them (more like making some worse in the process), just a cash cow for the fans of the series and cringe collaborations.
I have to point of the features I really like so this doesn't seem like a rant. 1) We are being allowed to customize the cars, which cannot be taken for granted I guess. 2) Wrap sharing and the editor itself is really cool.
You expected something more? Yeah, the game is pretty boring and unengaging.
PS: I still don't know who asap rocky is and he * me around so much.
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If the reader has anything to add I'm really open to discussing it, especially to the like-able features. I didn't come here to argue but to explore others' points of view, let's keep it civil.
