Another street racer in EA's long-lasting franchise just hit our systems...
A couple of millennia ago (12 years to be exact, but in informatics it's the same thing), the first The Need For Speed hit 3DO and was subsequently ported over to the PC and the two most powerful consoles of that time, the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn.
Its idea was simple: drive million-dollar-worth-of dream cars out in more "mundane" settings instead of closed circuits.
The franchise kept this style for years to come, until circa 2000, with Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed, which featured a solid 'career' mode (called Evolution, because you went from 1950 to 2000 starting with the very first Porsche and working your way through years buying new cars as they were made available and finally arriving to the 996 Turbo) and a tough Factory Driver. It was also the first NFS to feature point-to-point races instead of closed tracks. It's considered one of the best iteration in the franchise -- along with Need For Speed 4 (dubbed "High Stakes") -- thanks to its deep performance customisation and solid physic engine.
The next NFS title was a return to the roots: NFS Hot Pursuit 2, with tons of dream cars and intense police chases through all sorts of beautiful tracks in even prettier scenarios.
Then EA in 2003, maybe after watching some unknown movie about street racing, decided to turn the serie into a street racing game with NFS Underground.
Police chases were kissed goodbye and dream cars were replaced with import tuner cars, and several new game modes were introduced like drag and drift racing, other than the usual lap circuit and sprint.
Heavy tuning options were the hype of the game, allowing players to modify cars both visually and on the performance side.
The game also featured strictly virtual characters: a chick that guided you through menus and the career mode (called "Underground"), a couple of guys you went to race against, and some other guys working in repair shops that awarded you unique parts from time to time.
A year later, NFS Underground 2 boosted these figures, with a free-roam world, more upgrades, slightly different game mechanics (like rechargeable nitrous while racing for example) and replacing the virtual chick from NFSU1 with a real-life model. They also added SUVs, which were terrible at best.
The next NFS Most Wanted introduced an interesting storyline and even added some stuff (like the ability to directly jump to an event instead of having to drive there; car's heat, checkpoint races; tons of real-life characters to race against, with each character having a bold story instead of being anonymous like those in NFSU1, gorgeous movies, and the return of the police with more than enough reasons to engage in thrilling chases against them) and subtracted others (drift was gone, and luckily those stupid SUVs), and of course enhancing the graphic engine. The game also was geared toward an orange feel which was both stylish and annoying at times.
Now we have NFS Carbon... You might think "OHHH, Finally !" and you might also ask why it took me so long to finally talk about the game... Well, truth is, the game is "more of the same". Let me elaborate.
The game's night racing will remind you NFS Underground 2, while visually recalling Most Wanted for the graphic detail. This is aggravated by the fact that most engine sounds are taken straight from MW, and even more disturbing is the fact that ALL of the radio chatter lines are taken from MW too! If it weren't for the pink arrows and the new HUD, one might confuse it with NFSU2, especially in down hill drifting races..
EA re-introduced the drifting mode which is my favourite mode. Now it works differently than it did in NFSU2, the car steers by itself and keep steering on its own, you only tell her adjustments to made; in a corner you can keep going without having to steer at all if you approach it right.
EA also had the time to add a crew to assist you in races, each with one skill: there are Drafters, Blockers, Scouts. Scouts go ahead and tell shortcuts (also highlighted on the mini map), Drafters go ahead of you and let you get sucked by their air vacuum to slingshot ahead, and then there are blockers, that as you might guess, help rival cars to spin out.
This is a neat idea, but they keep chatting to you while racing and this gets old and annoying quite soon (they have only a few lines each); of these three skills the most useful I found are blockers, that have the added benefit of not to make zone's heat increase where you happen to race.
Drafters aren't that useful because there's almost no track with a straightaway long enough to take advantage of them and scouts just defeat one's fun of finding shortcuts by himself.
All good so? No, because I found very disturbing that a race is considered won even if one of your teammates win, this just doesn't look right to me.
Another addition is that now the map is divided into zones, and like said every zone has a heat meter, which will impact police presence on that zone. The more you race and cruise on a zone, the more heat it will get. Race elsewhere and its heat will slowly decrease.
Every zone has a crew that owns it, and when you win enough races on that zone you take over that zone and it will be shown with your color on the map (light blue).
Later that zone might get "attacked" by a rival gang that want to take it back, and you get the message which sounds like the one in San Andreas that said "Your territory is under attack!", and you get to compete against them to maintain your control.
When you take over enough zones, a superboss will challenge you, first on an easy race on the roads of the contested territory (of which you took control of most zones, so you should know every corner by that time) and then on a 2-part canyon duel, a thrilling and devastating experience. Said into few words, in part 1, boss in front, you behind; you have to stay close to get more points; if you pass him for 10 seconds you win, if you fall off a cliff you lose.
In part 2, you'll have the points you accumulated in part 1; positions are switched and you must make sure the boss stays as far as possible because the closer he stays, the more points he'll subtract from your total.
If you run out of points you lose, if he hits you, he subtracts 5000 from your total (which is dumb, on the second leg hitting the chasing car should be considered a stupid move, something you don't wanna do, because it's easy to just keep ramming the guy in front and win).
When you win, that territory is yours and you're presented with the familiar cards select screen from Most Wanted, where you can only choose 2 of them and I guess you always hope that one of them is the pink slip to the boss' car.
My thought about canyon dues? Flawed concept.
EA also divided vehicles in classes this time: Tuners, Exotics and Muscles. This idea seems to be somewhat derived from Midnight Club 3 (note that it also has a "SUV" category, maybe derived in turn from NFS Underground 2). Each class has cars that excel in a certain department: Tuners have good cornering abilities but suffer in the top speed department, meanwhile Muscles have stellar acceleration at the expense of awful handling. Exotics prefer top speed above everything else.
At the start of the career you must choose which class to start the game on, this will change what the initial territory you'll race on.
Another disturbing thing is the mini map. When you are stopped dead it shows a larger area than the one you see while moving, this is yet another insane idea from EA's guys (and beta testers alike).
Police chases are also toned down, with no reason at all to engage in fights with them, because you don't have to build any bounty; and the new map screen gives you access to every race and every shop so basically it's fairly possible to play through Carbon without having to 'free roam' at all.
What else to say? Tracklist is fine, though I didn't listened to every track, they're ok, but your best bet is an endless playlist loaded in your favourite player. I dind't check if the Xbox version has custom soundtracks support because I never use that feature, so I can't say anything.
And I think I said more than enough about sound effects earlier.
One last addition is the the autosculpt feature, which lets you customise any visual part to a certain level; it's a great thing, too bad you unlock it only after a while (after you defeat the first boss in the canyon duel).
Well, conclusions?
It's yet another boring street racing game, but be careful: I don't say that it isn't fun, because it's always fun to race on a circuit be it on a dream car, an import tuner, a monster truck, a kart, a wheelbarrow, and so on, but the problem is, this is getting too old, this level of recycling is too high, EA should think of something fresh for the next iteration, maybe throwing away these import tuner cars and moving to, say, Tuk-Tuk racing.