The best NFS in my opinion since Underground 2. For the record, I've finished this on Xbox Game Pass, and am playing for a second time on Steam after buying it, hence the lower play time (at the time of this review at least).
[h2] How it plays [/h2]
The handling is really simple but not overly so. It makes drifting very accessible, and the race types leave many modern racing games feeling gaunt in comparison. The sense of speed is really really good, and cars feel distinct in their handling characteristics.
Upgrading your car isn't too slow or fast of a process, at least it didn't feel like it to me. If anything it felt better balanced than NFS Heat and Unbound both. It's a simple system and not necessarily for the hardcore car fans amongst us, but neither are the aforementioned titles, so it's par for the course.
Thankfully this game has flexible fast travel, so you don't feel like your traversing the world is entirely unjustified filler. The player should WANT to drive around your world. Not be forced to because you need padded time investments from your player base.
[h2] Graphics & atmosphere [/h2]
The graphics are insane, and it easily stands up to modern titles today. It runs flawlessly on an Ryzen 5600x with a 2080 Super at 4K, as well as my recently obtained RX 9070. Navigating the city and seeing the amazing lighting and reflections pass you by make you feel something genuine. I could gush for hours about how unique and pretty this game is.
The atmosphere is insanely well done, and you can tell that the devs put a huge amount of passion and soul into the game's development, which is likely explained by the fact that Ghost were disbanded after this game's release - the writing was probably on the wall, and they pulled out all the stops with this game to try prevent it. But EA had other things in mind. It's a shame the public didn't respond as positively to the game's release at the time.
[h2] Issues [/h2]
It has some weird decisions with regards to the game's structure, at least in terms of how it tries to force you to play in a shared online world with other players, and you can't avoid this without entering the online world and only then going back into game settings and selecting "Play Alone", which equates to offline play. The loading times to initially get into a game are also abysmal, which is heresy considering how much faster PCs are nowadays.
[h2] Story / cinematics / cutscenes [/h2]
The myriad cinematics littered through the campaign as you work your way up to being 'recognised' aren't necessarily amazing from a storytelling perspective, but they have a ton of character and I can really appreciate what went into filming them. Spike was my fav, just for how expressive he is, and maybe Amy after that.
The camera work during cinematics and cutscenes is insanely good, with seamless transitions from cinematics to in-game scenes when in the garage, and the cars all look amazing. Even the fact that they pulled some renowned personalities from the street racing scene into the game's story despite their awful acting skills was appreciated.
[h2] Issues [/h2]
There are some issues, such as bugs with the liveries not loading due to conflicts between EA's launcher and Steam requiring a lot of fiddling with cache clearing and so on, or the game not letting me do the little side events where you take photos or collect parts, but a restart fixes the latter.
[h2] Conclusion [/h2]
Ultimately, I love this game with a passion, and I wish Ghost was given more chances to create games for this franchise, as they very clearly knew how to make an amazing world with addictive gameplay.
I salute you Ghost, you were very, very underrated.
If you want a unique, addictive, atmospheric, heavily-tailored and graphically optimised game, this is the one. Just don't go in looking for realism. This is only a slight bit less over the top than NFS Heat.
[h2] Sim racing wheel usage [/h2]
I'm sure noone really cares about this one, but sim racing wheels don't really work with it outside of Logitech ones (in some cases), so if you have any other sim racing wheel with FFB, expect to tear some hair out getting it working.
I'm using a PXN VD6 wheelbase with Moza pedals and a TRS shifter on my second playthrough and it's a nightmare to get set up (as the game's not made for it). But if anyone needs assistance with getting one set up using wheel2xinput or xoutput, feel free to ask in the comments. I'm happy to sharee my config and the link to the steam forum thread that helped me get a game config that prevents the game from misreading the xinput axes and buttons by default on load.
Play it, you know you want to. It's worth every cent. Go on now.
