Last good Need for Speed. Amazing graphics. Basically NFS HP II from 2002 but better graphics and newer cars.

Be aware, this review is coming from someone that grew up with NFS Underground 1+2, NFS MW 05 and NFS Undercover, all on his PS2, and that has been replaying NFSMW05 on his PC with keyboard every few years, so I might be inherently biased. Additionally I played this with a keyboard only, no wheel, no gamepad. I will also be reviewing this game without ANY nostalgia for the game, since this is my first playthrough and therefore this review will treat the game as a game, not as a remaster of another game.

Additionally I want to send ahead this is a BREAK TO DRIFT game. If you dont want to deal with that, dont buy this game. This game forces you to drift many times per race, because most of the cars have the steering of your average truck. As a NFSMW05 player it took me a long while to get used to it and not absolutely hate this game. So yea, the first 5-10 hours of this game were a mess for me.


The Good:

Textures and lighting were generally good, in general I liked the graphics of the game. The only thing that I can nitpick is the fact that some of the car maker emblems are a bit low-res.

The angle of doing both sides of street racing was quite interesting to me, I had a lot of fun about that being a big part of the game. Where a bit less than half of the game you will have to play as a cop and either hunt down racer(s) and try to kill their cars or drive with your police car to a street race crime scene fast, but minimizing crashing. The other half of the game is street race events where you either just do a race without any weapons against other AI racers, do a race with weapons against AI racers and the police, do a race against time without weapons or with weapons.

AFTER I got used to it, the driving was fun to me, less rubberbanding than in NFSMW05.


The Bad:

Clear as day this was made with Gamepad only in mind. Many of the keybinds are very stupid from the getgo. The mouse has ZERO functionality in the game.

The game is locked to a maximum of 60 FPS.

In front of EVERY race (including after every restart!) there are 2 cutscenes that roughly take 10 seconds combined. This is especially annoying when restarting the race, especially if you failed a bunch of times already. Not on bad hardware, yes Im running a NVME SSD.

They make you accept a bunch of EA ToS and Privacy dislosure crap, sending user data to the US, etc. pp..

The voicelines are often incorrect, being in singular, f.e. "The suspect [...]", but we are in a race with multiple people. Voicelines also often are just wrong like "Suspect entered a tunnel" even though Im the only one against the cops and still quite far from the tunnel. Ruins my immersion a bit.

The takedown and weapon attack cutscenes are sometimes over the top, often Id have rather not gotten a cutscene at all since it also takes away your control for a while. After coming out of the cutscene, you cant control your car anymore for a bit, because the race didnt stop. It probably is using the driving AI in the meantime and sometimes it is driving you into very bad positions you will struggle to get out of. You can however also abuse it to skip on roadblocks or nails ahead of you since you appear to be phasing through them during the cutscene. All of this is bad game design in my opinion, especially since you tend to get lots of these cutscenes per race.

I dislike the preview events, because you are given a car that you arent ready for and it leads to the player not being able to learn the handling of a few cars that make it work, but rather get forced into driving all kinds of cars from the get-go, making learning the handling of the cars even harder, than it already was, at least for me.

At least when playing the German version of the game (I dont know if this also applies to the English version of the game): By default the voice lines of the intro are way too quiet because the music and car noises are too loud to hear what the voice actor is saying. You have to read the subtitles.

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I dont know if this is deserving of a recommended or not recommended judgement. Id love to give it a "Mixed" rating, but in the end I had fun, so Ill give it a Recommended, but with massive caveats, since the first few hours of the game for a NFSMW05 player like me were hell.

Game is way too difficult.