After rebooting the franchise with Need for Speed Underground, EA has continued to produce some solid street racers under the Need for Speed banner. Last year’s Need for Speed Most Wanted, which featured hilariously over-the-top live-action cutscenes and seriously tense police pursuits, proved to be a high watermark for the franchise. Now it’s being followed up by Need for Speed Carbon, which downplays the role of the police chases, introduces some simple team-racing mechanics, and occasionally takes the action off the city streets and into the outlying canyons. The new gameplay doesn’t always improve the experience, but the racing can still be quite intense and still has a pronounced sense of style. (Read post…)
It can’t be easy to be a game developer in charge of releasing a new game in a series every year. People don’t want the same game over and over, yet they’re unhappy if the game strays too far from the established formula. EA deserves credit for trying something different with Need for Speed ProStreet, but the new direction of the series fails to live up to the level of the previous games. There’s still a solid racing experience here, and the online component of the PC version is quite good. But the game’s premise is uninteresting, the in-game advertising is over the top, and it doesn’t run particularly well. In the end, ProStreet is just another decent but uninspired racing game.
Unlike the last two Need for Speed games, which told the story of an underground street racer through campy yet entertaining cutscenes, ProStreet follows the legal street racing career of Ryan Cooper. The game still uses cutscenes to try to instill some story into the proceedings–something about Ryan getting dissed by a big-time street racer–but it’s uninteresting thanks to terrible voice acting and unlikable characters. Ignoring the story, it’s your goal to head to different events, dominate them, challenge the best of the best, and then take on Ryo, the man who disrespected you after your first race. (Read post…)
For the most part, the reaction to the last few Need for Speed games was the same: “Why aren’t they more like Need for Speed Most Wanted?” “Where are the cheesy cutscenes and the over-the-top cop chases?” It seems as if EA heard those cries, because for better or for worse, Need for Speed Undercover feels like Most Wanted.
In Undercover you play the role of…wait for it…an undercover officer. Along with agent Chase Linh, played by the attractive Maggie Q, your job is to take down a group of street racers that have somehow become involved in an international smuggling ring. The story is told via campy cutscenes that fail to capture the charm of Most Wanted thanks to uninteresting characters and a predictable plot. Having a story provides incentive to make it through race after race, but the whole “this is cheesy so it’s cool” thing feels kind of forced this time around. (Read post…)
Burnout Paradise reinvigorated Criterion’s ultra-successful smash-up racing series when it launched this time last year on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box brings the series’ trademark racing action to the PC for the first time. With solid online and offline play, an almost staggering number of events, and more than 70 vehicles, Ultimate Box is at the front of the PC racer pack.
The amount of variety in the game is huge, and how you approach it is up to you; explore Paradise City’s open world at leisure, unlock the 70-plus vehicles one at a time through single-player events, or join other players for races and challenges online. Couple this deep variety with the fact that it’s hugely fun, and Burnout Paradise is easy to recommend. In addition to all of the content from the original console game, Ultimate Box also includes all of Burnout Paradise’s downloadable content released to date. First up, there’s Codename: Cagney, which adds the Stunt Run, Marked Man, and Road Rage modes to online multiplayer. The Bikes pack adds two-wheeled racing and a day/night cycle to the series for the first time. And last, there’s Burnout Party, the first paid-for content to hit the game. Burnout Party is a pass-the-controller-style offline party mode for two to eight players and is a fun new way to experience Burnout. (Read post…)
The Formula One season may already be underway, but gamers have another six months to wait before they can jump in this year’s cars themselves. Thankfully, Codemasters has been hard at work on this game since the publisher acquired the gaming rights to the F1 World Championship and showed off the game for the first time at an event in London yesterday.
While none of the 2010 cars are yet in the game, the demo and brief hands-on time were enough to show quite how good the game looks using the data the team had from 2009. The game is based on Codemasters’ Ego engine, which was used to drive its previous highly rated racing games Grid, Colin McRae: Dirt, and Dirt 2 but with a significant number of tweaks from the engine’s core development team to ensure it’s up to the job of modeling the pinnacle of motorsport. (Read post…)
In Dirt 2, you assume the role of an up-and-coming race driver who’s competing on the off-road circuit against such pros as Ken Block and Travis Pastrana for the first time. That’s a daunting prospect, but one of the many great things about Codemasters’ latest racer is that you can have a lot of fun with it and end the lengthy Dirt Tour career mode a champion regardless of your skill level. Your opponents aren’t pushovers; in fact, they put up a believable fight from start to finish, but the vehicle handling and damage is forgiving, the difficulty level can be altered before every event, and a slick flashback feature gives you the option to instantly replay portions of a race if you make a mess of them. Dirt 2 isn’t as realistic as some of the other excellent off-road racers that have come before it, but it’s as accessible and exciting as any of them. (Read post…)
Free-to-play online racer enters four-day public beta ahead of its full release.
With less than three weeks separating today from Need for Speed World’s July 20 release date, Electronic Arts is using the time to hammer out the massively multiplayer online racer’s final kinks today by opening its beta for all.
The beta kicked off today at 10 a.m. PDT and allows gamers to get behind the virtual wheel and check out what those who got into the closed beta experienced. Those interested in jumping into the game can sign up at World.NeedForSpeed.com and hop into the action when the servers go live. (Read post…)