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Need For Speed Heat Review: Racing in Palm City – the fictional street racing capital of the world – is all about making money and building a reputation. During the day, there are sanctioned races in closed streets, with safety barriers, an admiring crowd, and significant cash prizes awaiting those crossing the finish line. At night, illegal street racing floods the city’s neon-drenched roads, and police respond in a friendly manner, covering the starry sky with the sound of thundering V12s and buzzing sirens.
This dichotomy between day and night sets Need for Speed Heat apart from its contemporaries. It provides the best access to Ghost Games yet, taking away much of the series’ unnecessary baggage to get to the core of where Need for Speed is all about.
Need For Speed Heat Review: About
- Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
- Developer: EA Gothenburg
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Genres: Racing
- Release Date: November 8, 2019
Need For Speed Heat Review: Official Trailer Video
Need For Speed Heat Review: Gameplay
There is still a wild story about crooked cops and racing teams who take themselves too seriously; it is packed with corny dialogues, far-fetched stakes, and annoying characters that would fail in previous Fast and Furious movies. Story missions also pop up every once in awhile, forcing you to follow a character as they talk to you, and there’s even a case of a terrible tail mission. Aside from this, the story is downgraded to background noise that is easy to ignore, especially if you choose to skip one of the cutscenes.
Every aspect of the game’s design is built around the core dynamics between day and night. Official track races dominate Miami’s faux streets when the sun is out and reward you with money that can be spent on new cars, parts, and visual customization options. However, the auto parts companies and car sellers in Palm City are a particular group. They don’t just sell to anyone – that’s their love for cars. They should know that you are “cool” enough and try their best to do their best, so most of the night is spent in illegal street racing to earn reps and convince them of your origins.
The duality of this concept creates an unmistakable atmosphere for every moment of the day – almost as if it were two completely different worlds. The sun-drenched streets feel relatively safe, with sanctioned events radiating a casual, pleasant atmosphere. Courses are marked with barricades, there is room to float your car sideways around most corners, and all you have to worry about is beating the other participants to the finish. Palm City nightlife, on the other hand, is risky and full of dangers.
Cops in Need for Speed Heat introduce a unique sense of fear because of the way they are intrinsically linked to your representative. As you win races and accumulate more reps during night work, your Heat level will steadily increase. Getting the attention of the boys in blue will speed up your Heat’s climb, and the police become more aggressive and plentiful, the higher it climbs. There is an element of risk and reward here because a higher Heat level means a greater multiplier for all the reps you built in one night.
The only way to bank that representative is to escape from the police and reach a hiding place, but this is easier said than done when the police follow you on your tail like a rash. You can play it safe and save which rep you have, or extend the night by thwarting the police in the hope that you can shake them if your multiplier is higher. The best moments of Need for Speed Heat come when you’ve led the fuzz on a happy merry-go-round and threw them through the skin of your teeth to get a significant amount of rep.
Although the police tend to feel unfair, if they get close enough and suddenly stop your car, a “broken” timer will appear, automatically indicating that your escapades have reached their end when they tap down. The problem with this, aside from how quickly it is running out, is that it will keep counting down the seconds even after you run away from the police. It should be hard to escape the cop’s claws, but since you can get arrested if they trick your car, it ends up in the cuffs because a random timer counts down when you’re not even in pen is frustrating.
However, these scenarios can be exciting, especially when you put your car in top gear. Need for Speed Heat has a fantastic sense of speed as cars and lights along your side mirrors look blurry to what feels like 300 miles per hour. A noticeable delay on your control inputs makes every car feel a little heavier than it should otherwise. The driveability model also doesn’t have the malleability to change driveability from one car to another, so they all feel relatively similar to drive alongside variations in speed and acceleration.
Drifting is also a bit iffy and borrows its mechanics from Ridge Racer, unlike Need for Speed’s past. Instead of applying the brakes to get your car sideways, Need for Speed Heat asks you to release the accelerator and then pump it again to achieve a successful drift. It’s a realistic approach, boiling drifting to nimble throttle control, but it can be hard to get a grip on at first, as braking the brakes feels much more intuitive due to the past 15 years of racing games adopting this method.
There are also special drift events, which require you to buy the right parts if you want to get on top of it, and it is here where Need for Speed Heat improves significantly over its immediate predecessor, Payback. No luck-based speed maps are needed to enhance your car, nor are you limited to using specific vehicles at designated events. Instead, the upgrade system in Need for Speed Heat gives you the freedom to take a Nissan Skyline and mix and match parts like the suspension, tires, and differential, until you have a car that can compete in road racing, off-road races, and drift events.
Conclusion
With only a limited number of events, no discernible difference between the driving behavior of any car and a simplistic driving model, Need for Speed Heat has been tripping in repetition over the last few hours. So it’s not exactly a raging return to form, but this latest entry puts the Need for Speed series back on track. The duality of the day and night events supports what would otherwise be a reasonably mundane racing game.
However, the renewed focus on racing around the track, wheel-to-wheel racing, and customizing each car in different ways takes advantage of the essence of what Need for Speed Review was about.