The concept had some potential, but the brevity of the campaign, which clocked in at roughly four hours, coupled with an over-reliance on cutscenes, scripted segments and non-driving quick-time events, made this racer feel kind of short on actual racing.
You can’t fault The Run for its ambition, which saw Need for Speed shed the basic circuit racing shtick to focus on one, long interstate odyssey spanning coast to coast. It’s just a shame that the gameplay is diminished by exceedingly long, wide and boring point-to-point tracks. It sounds quaint by today’s standards, though for a generation of gamers and car lovers that grew up with Lamborghini Diablos postered on their bedroom walls, it was pretty exciting. These cars had interior views, were modeled on their unique specifications (owing to that Road & Track tie-in) and came accompanied with oodles of CD-ROM-filling multimedia content, like press photos and videos. (Then again, it is far superior to the lows.) At a time when licensed vehicles were still a rarity in racing games, The Need for Speed offered a swath of the most desirable sports cars in the world, with an attention to detail its contemporaries lacked. There's nothing egregiously wrong with the first Need for Speed it's just not particularly fun or noteworthy in light of the highs the franchise would rise to in the future. Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed (1994) But something about this take on Most Wanted fills you with that nagging feeling of a good game rushed to incompletion. There’s no doubt the wizards at Criterion could have made a more fitting tribute to one of the most iconic entries in the franchise, especially because they already accomplished exactly that with the more well-rounded Hot Pursuit reboot in 2010. It’s also remarkably short, omits car customization entirely and incorporates AI rubber banding to a degree that puts Mario Kart's to shame (an impressive feat, we must admit). Most Wanted 2012 has, well, none of that. That game had a world teeming with exciting moments, furnished with endless, fun events and a physics engine that encouraged a will to discover. And while there's some merit to that assessment, it's also pretty unfair to Paradise. NFS: Most Wanted (2012)Ĭertainly one of the most polarizing entries in the series, Criterion's Most Wanted is typically remembered by those who played it as Burnout Paradise with licensed cars. It’s a shame, because ProStreet did have a killer track list that included underappreciated gems like Japan’s Autopolis and Ebisu, the recently-revived Portland International Raceway and even the historic Avus loop in Germany. The problem for developer Black Box proved a familiar one: half-baked physics that render certain vehicles undriveable, coupled with a predisposition for gimmicks (like a minigame in which you heat up your tires before drag racing) that were no replacement for a satisfying driving experience.
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Released in the same year as Codemasters’ generation-defining Grid, ProStreet similarly attempts to capture a grittier side of circuit racing with a simulator flair, without the sterility of Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. The thing about Need for Speed’s lawful turn is that it wasn’t so much a bad idea - just badly executed. Carbon, conversely, has aged into one dark, murky blur. All these years later, I can still remember my favorite cooldown spots and stretches of road in Most Wanted. The perpetual night setting certainly doesn't do Carbon any favors, nor does its personality-less metropolitan map that holds few, if any, memorable features. However, the more you play it, the more you realize it somehow also fails to recognize what made Most Wanted a fan favorite to begin with. NFS: Carbon (2006)Īt the outset, Carbon doesn't do a whole lot to distance itself from Most Wanted before it. Instead, it added yet another notch to the franchise's long list of failed reboots. Thematically, 2015 had the conviction to redefine Need for Speed for an exciting new era.
Yet, it’s all mercilessly undone, beaten and torn beyond recognition by the least intuitive handling model ever to grace a triple-A racing game.
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NFS 2015 had everything going for it: a clear vision, phenomenal visuals for the time and the most powerful customization engine the series had seen up to that point. Not since Capcom's Auto Modellista has a racing game so perfectly captured a flavor of car culture fans had been yearning for, yet been so inexplicably dreadful to play.
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