Everyone in this year’s Need For Speed—racers and cops both—is
an asshole. Neither side is likable. Thank God. It’s incredibly freeing to be a
total, speed-obsessed jerk, especially when it’s accompanied by amazing visuals
and intense velocity. Way to welcome us to next-gen, Need For Speed Rivals
Viewed on PlayStation 4, Rivals
will make
your eyes pop out. The streaks of rain on your car’s back window, the
swirling leaves as you blaze through a forest road and a rock-solid framerate
all combine into an experience that feels cutting edge. Piloting a Bugatti Veyron
cop car into a rowdy scrum of illegal street racers during a thunderstorm
through canyon roads feels like a collective fever dream that Ghost Games
decided to make a reality. All of it happens with an amazing sense of speed,
too. This game is the enemy of blinking. One distraction and you’re screwed.
https://kotaku.com/need-for-speed-rivals-looks-amazing-whether-you-play-it-1447871333
Players will control both a racer and a cop during their
time on Redview City’s streets. Rapid Response/Time Trials are point-to-point
races, Hot Pursuit has cops trying to shut down a whole competition while
racers try to finish and Interceptor makes players chase down or run away from
a single car. There are standard-style races, too. All of the action lets you
treat the world’s most exotic cars in completely outlandish ways.
The game’s Pursuit Tech gadgets get equipped in one of two
slots. These items can send out shock waves, generate electromagnetic
interference or call in helicopters to drop spike strips along a race route.
They all have cooldown periods so you won’t be able to spam them one right
after the other on opponents.
Almost every action in the game earns Speed Points, which
you use to upgrade your fleet of cars. If you get busted by the cops as a
racer, you lose all Speed Points. It really sucks to build up a nice cache of
Speed Points during a session playing as a racer, only to lose them when you
get busted. So it pays to bank them at a Hideout when you can. The campaign’s
broken into chapters that will require you to do things like wreck a certain
number of racers, get a Silver finish in a race event or exceed a requested
speed for a couple of seconds. Events
come in either Race, Pursuit or Drive categories (Patrol, Undercover or
Enforcer for Cops) and you’ll need to do at least one type to complete a
chapter and unlock more cars and gadgets. It’s a branching structure that lets
you sample and eventually play to your strengths. For example, I’m not a
precision racer but was still able to progress by choosing missions that let me
bust racers as a cop.
As far as story, it’s what you expect. Racers want to race.
Cops don’t want them to race. There are some horrible videos about police going
over the line and drivers just wanting to, like, be free, man. The Cops
campaign endgame is a call-up to the Vehicle Response Team, the FBI’s special
anti-street-racing team. Yeah, I don’t know. Just go with it. Or not. Short as
they are, the interstitials aren’t worth watching. The dialogue is terrible,
like daily affirmations for dudebros or, I don’t know, CrossFit for gearheads. Do
yourself a favor and use those moments to answer nature’s call, especially
since there’s no pause functionality in Rivals
That’s right. When you press the Options button, all that
does is bring up a map overlay so you can pick the next thing you want to do.
The only way to suspend the racing—must… race… more! Why aren’t I racing right
now?!— is to head to a Hideout or Command Post. These spots are where you’ll do
grades or switch back and forth from racer to cop.
You need to have your console connected to the internet to
play Rivals. There’s no offline mode. The networked
nature of Rivals‘ AllDrive design
is simultaneously its biggest strength and greatest liability. It means that
you can be in the middle of a Time Trial and see another bunch of folks tearing
ass at the intersection right in front of you, with all the jerky control of
real-life humans.
The best thing about Rivals
is how its various elements can interlock with each other, creating a crazy
minute-by-minute escalation of tension. If you thought trying to catch up to
the guy in first place on a winding stretch of road was hard, try doing it with
a pack of rabid cops swarming all over you. But then a friend or random
stranger can speed into the next lane and get the pigs off your tail. Awesome.
Or that same person can try and bust you. Also awesome, just in a different
way.
But when online hiccups happen, everything about the game is
affected. Watching one of the terrible cutscenes that make up the game’s anemic
story? Not anymore you’re not! “You have disconnected from the current game.”
Inexplicably dropped sessions are a major pain in the ass
with Rivals. Sure, host migration
happens quickly enough when a connection is lost. But I lost progress two times
after the action started back up. One of those instances was during a challenge that required me to rack up 100,000 Speed Points
during one session. After about an hour of play, I got up to 50,000 some-odd
points before a broken connection killed my progress. After host migration, I
was slammed back to a big fat zero.
Why did this happen? Was no part of my
data being saved locally? Was a running total not tacked to my profile? Was it
lost in host migration? I have no idea and therein lie the perils of an
always-online game. While the appeal of AllDrive is apparent, cracks like the
one above make me wonder why the developers didn’t make the feature something
that runs in the background. Even the worst punk in the world doesn’t deserve
to have their session scuttled by network woes.
When it’s working as intended, Rivals presents a strong case for games that intentionally blur the
line between playing by your lonesome and being part of a virtual community.
All the game design chops in the world can’t hold a candle to the elation of
winning out over another person in competition, or helping a buddy complete a
tough pursuit. But the best iteration of that impending future is still a ways
away and Rivals also illustrates
going to be a turbulent journey to smooth, reliably connected always-online
console experiences. But Rivals looks good enough and plays
sharply enough to make me want to stick around and watch how the kinks get
ironed out.
Update: A previous version of this review said that there is no offline mode in Need For Speed Rivals. That was incorrect. It’s a better experience with an online connection but can be played without one. We regret the error.
