After a year off, Need For Speed has the series coasting back over familiar turf, resurrecting the spirit of 2003 and 2004’s successful Underground games. It is, at least, a more clearly distinct game than the last few NFS instalments were from one another. It looks incredible, sounds fantastic, and while the handling is still standard arcade fare developer Ghost Games has added a welcome dose of nuance by letting us tune our cars for either grip or drift. However, the single-player component is over too soon, the multiplayer underdelivers, the cut-scene dialogue often had   me wincing, and the game is stung by the side-effects of being online-only.                                                                                                                                                                                    It is immediately extremely pretty, though. There are dark and gritty instances where it feels a little like the whole thing has been shot on Michael Mann’s iPhone, but racing at speed through the soaked streets here (particularly in bumper cam) is really something else. The cars glisten with beaded water droplets and the streets gleam, a shiny tapestry of mirror-like asphalt reflecting artificial light from all angles. Need for Speed also sounds nearly as good as it looks; the throaty burble of performance-tuned engines is well-realised and the crackle of exhaust overrun and the ker-chunk of slamming gears is similarly respectable. However, the sudden, jarring transitions from the dead of night, to pre-dawn, and then back to night again are horribly ill-conceived. These transitions seem to be baked into parts of the environment so they can actually happen multiple times over the course of a single race.                                                                                                                                                                                                 
                                                                    Need for Speed’s light narrative plays out in a series of short, live-action cut-scenes, brimming with slang I don’t understand, excessive energy drink consumption, overuse of the word “hashtag”, and a slightly comical amount of first-person fist-bumping.
                                                                                                                                                There are five main characters who, when they aren’t speaking to each other like living, breathing internet memes, each represent a different one of Need for Speed’s five themed racing threads. All of these threads lead to an encounter with a real-life automotive icon; an idea which I genuinely like.                                                                                                                                                                                                            The best thread is ‘Outlaw’, which is really just a mix of all the game’s race types with the cops on your tail. The cop action is scaled back from Hot Pursuit and Rivals but I certainly appreciate how the police AI seems a lot more fair and bound by the in-game physics than it ever did in Ubisoft’s The Crew. Considering it was the standout mode in the old Underground games, the lack of any drag racing in Need for Speed seems like a misguided omission.
                                                                                                                                              It’s not an especially long story, though. There are 79 main events, but I blasted through them in just two days. The often shameless rubber band AI screwed me out of a few wins here and there but, for the most part, there were only a handful of races I needed to repeat. This modest length might be less of a problem if the multiplayer was more robust, but it isn’t.

Need for Speed - Official Launch Trailer
01:36
Like The Crew, Need for Speed requires a constant internet connection to play – even if you want to play solo. Unlike The Crew, you can’t just simply opt into multiplayer and rely on the game to take care of matchmaking and enlist you into a series of events. This really didn’t need to be an always online game, and because it is, you can’t even pause the game, which I found extraordinarily annoying. Plus, without decent PvP, the only thing left after the brief campaign is hunting down Need for Speed’s frankly boring collectables. Exactly why are we collecting photographs of plain, dimly-lit parking lots and anonymous.
2 NOV 2015













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