Need for Speed

Here’s a riddle for you: What do you get by combining fast cars, multiple customization options, FMV, and real world car icons? Well, you get a lot of weird moments. You also get a surprisingly fun game hampered by frustrating network issues and bizarre glitches. This game is known as Need for Speed.

If the title is any indication, Need for Speed is a reboot of the popular racing series. 2013’s Need for Speed Rivals was a solid first entry on current-gen consoles, but it was also the last game made by former Burnoutdevelopers Criterion Games, although they were working under the title of Ghost Games. After Rivals was released, EA took a much-needed break to reassess the franchise and drum up excitement for something new by going back to a successful formula.

Unlike previous games in the series that all focus on open roads, Need for Speed goes back to the Fast and the Furious-inspired urban street racing roots that made Carbon and the original Most Wanted so popular. Every race takes place at night, FMV is constantly used, and tuner culture is front and center. It’s a nice change of pace from the open landscapes of Rivals, and it hearkens back to the PS2 and original Xbox racers that seemed so technologically advanced at the time.

Living your life a quarter mile at a time may not be the most popular racing style ever, but Need for Speedhas always been best when drawing heavy inspiration from Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. Yes, driving Italian sports cars is cool, but there is just something fun about taking a random little car like a Subaru BRZ or Mazda Miata and tuning until it’s more powerful than a Ferrari.

Need for Speed is perfect for people who love tinkering with cars because it includes more in-depth customization and tuning options than Need for Speed Rivals. Tuning your ride in Rivals was very simple and only consisted of limited options like paying for more acceleration and power. Need for Speed makes you feel like a real customizing expert with different fuel systems, suspensions, and brakes. Sure, you may not know why changing your ECU will affect the horsepower, but you still feel really cool doing it. The tuning options feel almost endless, to the point that you can adjust the ride height and handling settings on up to five cars at a time.

Even if you get bored of switching out tires or adjusting ride height, there is still a whole portion of the game dedicated to vehicle wraps and paint jobs. Instead of using a limited amount of decals and preset designs,Need for Speed includes a full-on editor that can be used to create some ridiculous vehicle wraps. You can edit colors, put vinyl on certain portions of the car, or you can layer decals to create a larger image. This editor functions much like the mask creator in Army of Two: the Devil’s Cartel, only on a much larger scale. Basically the only limitation of this editor is your creativity.

So you have multiple tricked out cars in your garage, but what’s the objective? Need for Speed answers this question by bringing back the goofy FMV cutscenes of old and cramming them full of random actors, real car icons, and more fist bumps than a frat house.

You start Need for Speed by nailing a drift and impressing a “caffeine addict” named Spike, who immediately introduces you to his crew of wannabe car icons. The members of the crew are Travis (the pseudo-leader of the group) Manu (a Zen master who idolizes Ken Block and drifting) Amy (the mechanic) Robyn (a wild child who only drives with big groups), and Spike (a psychopath obsessed with Monster tall boys and Magnus Walker). Each character gives out missions that ultimately lead to an introduction with their specific car icon. For example, completing all of Spike’s missions leads to some special races against Magnus Walker and a couple cutscenes with the Porsche icon. Unfortunately, the characters at the center of this FMV universe are terrible.

This whole scenario seems like a decent basis for the story, but it’s ultimately meaningless seeing how you were already on the street racing path before meeting this crew. Spike just forces you to join his group and help everyone meet celebrities. Actually, the story is way more frustrating when you stop and think about the fact that each member of the crew is just using you as a pawn to meet his or her hero. Once Manu meets Ken Block and gets offered a job—because of your inspired driving—he just drops off the face of the earth. No calls or race offers. He doesn’t even thank you for being the catalyst in his creepy stalker journey! The same can be said for Amy, who constantly insults your car’s tuning but uses you to get to the popular builder Nakai San. Those jerks. The only person who doesn’t want anything outright is Travis, but he’s just a weirdo.

Look, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with the characters in Need for Speed; they just aren’t that entertaining to be around, which is unfortunate because the actors do a decent job with their parts. The people behind Travis, Manu, and Amy even do a solid job disguising their British heritage with fake Californian accents. However, it is a little strange that two of the actors in Need for Speed worked together in the BBC series The Musketeers. Apparently, Porthos likes to Hoon in his free time, and Travis likes to murder French dignitaries.

The story of Need for Speed may not be amazing, but how is the actual racing?

Honestly, driving around the open world of Ventura Bay and completing events is pretty great. Ghost Games showcased the history with both Burnout and Need for Speed by creating a racing style that can be adjusted to each player’s preferences, and none of the races are overly difficult. The main race types consist of drift events, circuit races, time trials, sprints, and outlaw races. The sprints and time trials are decently entertaining given their shorter duration and emphasis on reaction times, but the circuit races can be frustrating depending on how many times the AI causes you to wreck.

Outlaw events are fun in theory, but the police are ridiculously stupid. Stringing a car chase along for more than 35 seconds is actually hard because the police will just randomly drive into walls or get stuck in the environment. The easiest way to complete these events is to feather the brakes and run from the police going about 45 mph. You may have to occasionally dodge a pit maneuver, but this is easily achieved.

Out of all the events, the Gymkhana races are by far the best. Anybody can drive fast and win time trials, but it takes a lot of trial and error to properly nail some perfect drifts. It will take some time, but you will ultimately learn to drift like a pro. Luckily, there are a ton of events that test and perfect your drifting ability, including some Ken Block specials. Even if you don’t want to try out drifting during an actual race, there are always miles of mountain roads to tear up with your custom rides. Practicing this way is a lot of fun and it gives you the opportunity to explore the amazingly gorgeous environments of Need for Speed.

The driving is great, but there are some frustrating issues to deal with. Like Rivals, Need for Speed is an “always on” game. There are no set Single Player or Multiplayer modes, and other players just roam around your world. This is a cool concept at first, but it can completely break the game if you are unlucky. If the network fails even for a second, the game will crash and send you back to the main menu. Hopefully you aren’t in the middle of winning a long circuit race or anything, because you will lose all progress.

Of course, losing connection isn’t the only issue with Need for Speed’s network. Watching other players take part in races is entertaining, but it can also be immensely frustrating if their race intersects with yours and causes multiple wrecks. This happens quite frequently during the final Gymkhana event as the drift route takes you through the most popular sections of a mountain road. There are so many cars traveling down this road that you have to focus more on avoiding wrecks than on drifting. There is a good chance that you will restart that Gymkhana event more than a dozen times simply because other players messed up your run.

Need for Speed does have a play alone feature, but good luck trying to find it buried in the menus.

The other major issue with Need for Speed is an astounding amount of glitches. Cars will randomly disappear mid-race, cops will fly into the air, and the navigation system will break at inopportune times. Most of these glitches are funny, but the worst ones actually spawn from a system that Ghost created to make racing easier. When you wreck in an important race, Need for Speed drops you back onto the track going almost full speed so you don’t have to worry about accelerating from zero while losing precious time. Unfortunately, this helpful concept rarely works. You may wreck in the middle of a highway, but the game will drop you on a sidewalk behind some barriers, or it may start you off facing the wrong direction. It’s actually easier to restart entire races—which takes a couple of minutes—than deal with the random placement of your car.

Sadly, there isn’t that much to do in the world of Need for Speed once you beat the main storylines. You can drive around completing the collectibles—doing donuts and taking pictures in special areas—or you can take part in two types of random races. First, there are the preset races that pop up after completing story missions. These should be mostly used for earning money and buying the last few cars. Next, there are the random races that can be completed by harassing and challenging other players. These various events are a fun way to add random excitement, but they don’t keep you engaged in the world or what’s left of the story.

Need for Speed is, on the outside, a solid reboot of an enjoyable franchise. Unfortunately, the network issues and weird glitches just destroy the heart and soul of the game, making it frustrating to play at times.

I genuinely believe that everyone should play Need for Speed, but if your internet isn’t amazing, or you don’t find glitches funny, then you may want to wait for the next patch or two to release.