Posts tagged need for speed

Bloody awful.

I played it yesterday when I was off work sick and could only stand it for about a minute before the horrible framerate made my head feel like it had split in two. (Before playing it merely felt like my head was in danger of splitting in two.)

You can play around and customise bits of your car before racing, but beyond the spoiler I doubt anybody would notice any difference during the racings. (Especially in the in-car view, obviously.)

Anyway, the framerate is no better than Most Wanted last year and the racing seems significantly more annoying and handling much more sludge-like.

I am not impressed.

Okay.

It really does have a terrible framerate which actually makes it harder to play than it should be.

But despite that it really is a very good game indeed.

When you get into a proper police chase it’s bloody marvellous. Like a slightly more refined but less funny GTA, or something.

So I’d finally decided that I did like it despite it’s horrible, horrible graphical horribleness… and then it went and froze up on me at the exact moment a police chase ended. Obviously a software rather than a hardware problem, but it did lock up the whole Xbox.

Oh EA, how do you manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like that, eh?

Hmm.

Hmm indeed.

See, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 was a fantastic game and people on forums and reviews have suggested that this was a return to form for the series. So I downloaded the demo and it seemed like great fun, except for having a horrific framerate. But on forums people said the full game didn’t suffer from the same issues and reviews didn’t mention it.

Which just goes to show that people are LIARS, because the framerate is rubbish. It doesn’t fluctuate too much, but it’s very low indeed. Well, if it’s not the framerate there’s something that makes the game look terribly bitty. It just doesn’t look smooth.

But I got used to that after an hour or so. Well, an hour and a half. I even almost got used to it.

The other odd thing is the colour scheme. It’s an autumnal look, giving everything a sepia tinge, which makes shortcuts and obstacles more difficult to spot than they should be. Very odd decision. I mean, it looks nice and fancy, but there’s something to be said for big bright colours, especially as it would help the actual driving.

So, is there anything good about the game at all?

Well, yes. The cut scenes are terrible, but amuse me greatly and are more entertaining than merely competent cut scenes would be. So that’s okay. And it’s structured nicely, with a certain amount of challenges to be done (in any order) before you can take on each boss. Excellently, you can either cruise round the city looking for the challenges or just bring up a quick menu and jump to any one you want. And there’s massive product placement for a brand that doesn’t even exist in this country, which is excellent.

Oh, yes, the driving/racing? It’s the very model of simple arcade handling. Pretty much spot on… except that, at least at this early stage, it lacks any sort of real character. It’s not like Project Gotham or OutRun 2, where the driving has some sort of soul to it, these cars just react like, well, old school video game cars, really. It’s not that the driving’s bad – it’s not – it’s just soulless. (Well, it is an EA game, I suppose.)

I mean it’s good, competent fun. But it hasn’t got my pulse racing yet and the graphical badness, in terms of smoothness and everything, take away some of fun. I’ll give it more time, but on first impressions, it’s looking like this isn’t anywhere near as good as Hot Pursuit 2.