More bugs than the beta... unfortunately typical of the NFS reputation. Also not free-to-play..you find out at lvl 10

User Rating: 2.5 | Need for Speed World PC
I played this during the beta and it was surprisingly fun. Very comfortable to control via your keyboard arrow keys. The basic race dynamic is a good ole classic. It almost reminds me of the last couple of good NFS's... High Stakes and Hot Pursuit 2... in how it was arcade fun and not arcade dumb.

Getting into Pursuit mode is relatively fun, though mostly boring as it is purely a singleplayer experience and very much like Most Wanted.. just smash stuff, evade, smash more stuff... decide when you want to try losing them. It doesn't offer anything beyond that so you feel no desire to achieve anything beyond stats.

Races seem good in terms of track layout... lapped circuits and sprints, always with shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts help, some are a waste of time.

BUT...

here's why this isn't worthy of a higher score. This game is supposed to be in a "release" phase now. How many people were suckered into buying the Starter Kit only to find the launcher still says Beta, and the game actually has more bugs now than it did in beta.

What bugs?... at the moment:
* Everytime I load the game I get hit with fresh Hints & Tips popups like I'm new.... they fixed this during the beta... apparently they're so incompetent in applying patches that their FIX was superficial. Yes, tell me for the umpteenth time what keys to use, and how Pursuit works.
* Insta traffic spawns during races.... no flash warning, they just solidify right infront of you killing your race. I never saw this happen during the beta... at one turn I had 2 cars spawn infront and behind me. I was locked in like a vice.
* Insta traffic spawns at the grid.... that's right, we finally get out of the loading screen to see 4 mini vans blocking almost everyone at the starting grid. Again, this NEVER happened during the beta that I ever saw OR heard about. I had a mini van spawned ONTOP of me at the grid once.
* Traffic AI behaves with greater stupidity now than ever before... trucks will swerve into you for absolutely no reason from the other side of the road. It's like racing in a city where 80% of the citizens become suicidal behind the wheel of a car... the more stopping power the traffic vehicle in question has, the more likely it is they'll make a suicidal swerve. This means crap scripting to make up for utterly lazy AI coding.
* unreliable collisions with opponents. I don't know if its lag or what, but there have been times where I have literally driven right up the backside of someone and somehow passed through them without harm... others I have tried to avoid with a tactical swerve only to find them warped where I've turned, stopping me dead in my tracks. Again... never saw anything this bad happen during the beta.
* LAG... I'm in Australia playing on the American server so there's a degree of lag I expect, and I saw some pretty bad lag issues during the beta, but nothing like it is now. Worst example? It seemed to take forever for the load screen to finally reach the grid, the race seemed to be going okay, some minor warping of the 2 South American racers on screen... midway through the first lap the three people coming last are suddenly finished? So the race started before half the grid were actually IN the race? That is a horrendous bug that shouldn't exist anywhere outside of the alpha.

I have noticed the worst lag issues occur when I'm in a race with south americans. It shouldn't matter to how my connection performs since I'm not connecting to Brazil but N. America, but there you go.

I have had some rather good races against decent, challenging opponents that didn't have a dodgem car mentality... so far they have been either Australian or N. Americans. I'm not saying South Americans can't drive, but the warping I've seen of them makes it impossible to tell who is a nub smashing back and forth on the track and who has skill.

Powerups are okay though sometimes seem impotent. Nitros usually feel like you've been given a 1% boost in speed. I rarely feel like powerups are necessary when racing... even with the horrific traffic AI, if you have a little skill you can anticipate how they will attack you when someone throws a traffic magnet onto you. They are very useful in the higher wanted levels of Pursuit mode, but that's kinda moot because pursuit is a lonely, repetitive experience.


In the end you have to balance the scope of the game with the money and time that has been put into it. On that level this game is a failure.

If you're thinking "well, it is a free game"... you're wrong. Because people are "welcome" to make microtransactions (even though you can play the game without ever paying a cent), that means there is a $$$ value attached to the quality of the game design/balancing/maintenance. Starter Kit buyers were screwed into paying for beta-quality access to perks and things they could have earned over time anyway. Instead they used their XP perk and other stuff in a game that is still incredibly buggy.

Having said that I plan on leveling up a bit more. It should be fun to have a quick play of this with friends in the future when it becomes more stable... but then again, if NFS Hot Pursuit is as good as we all hope, and the online play/system is as brilliant as they claim.... NFS World is going to be utterly useless with a mostly unskilled gamer community.

EDIT: I had this rated at 5, but now that I have reached level 10 I have lowered my score... this is a shameful game. I followed the info before release and saw everything that said it would be a free-to-play game. IT IS NOT. Hit level 10 and you are told you can't level any further until you buy the Starter Pack to get out of the Free Trial Mode... that's a scam.

So it breaks down like this... here's what you can access for free:
At best you can reach level 10 and play with all tier 1 cars, a couple of tier 2 cars, you will have access to SOME performance upgrades for tier 1 cars... you will have access to a handful of races, and the barricaded zones are, I realise now, blocked off to non-paying players (no wonder I only ever saw 2 people at level 40, and the highest below that was a level 12). This is basically a retail game where demo users have limited access (this ain't a new concept) that ALSO plans on expanding its microtransaction way of delivering content. Expect some later additions to the car roster to be purchasable with Boost ONLY.