NFS Rivals review

NFS Rivals review
     Rivals doesn't really have a storyline, but then this is a driving game so we can't say we care too much. The game gives you two play options: take the wheel as a racer to tear up the free play world that you exist in, or play as cops trying to keep the peace.

There are no boring cutscenes that try to help you justify anything, and certainly no backstory about how you are only racing to save your family being held by some Ray Liotta looking character. It's all about the fun.

    That doesn't mean to say that there isn't a campaign to complete, but you'll not only be hard pushed to care, but also to remember you've got to complete certain tasks to progress in the first place.

Set in the make-believe world of Red View County, Rivals' vast map is completely open and waiting to be explored. There is a range of different areas but with a huge focus on the countryside rather than city racing.

Dynamic lighting, rain, nightfall, sunsets, lens flare, dust, snow, and falling leaves all help breathe life into the gameplay, giving you a greater sense of realism than ever before.

Damage your car and at times the handling reacts accordingly, including driving on burst tyres. Crashes, you'll have plenty of them, are epic, although it's disappointing from a realism point of view that your car doesn't end up a complete wreck when you get back on track.

Interacting with the surrounding environment can be a bit hit or miss though.

Drive along a dirt track and the PS4 DualShock 4 controller slightly rumbles so you know you aren't on the smooth tarmac, but smash through a farmer's barn and you'll feel nothing.

As you can probably tell there are a lot of chances to get distracted in Need For Speed: Rivals. Like in Burnout, the premise is to drive to different locations around the world to complete specific missions, races, takedowns or escapes depending on which faction - racer or cop - that you've opted to play.

       What Rivals brings that’s new to the part is a system it calls AllDrive. Hot Pursuit introduced the idea of Autolog, where the game actively pits you against your Xbox Live or PSN friends, comparing achievements, finishing times and progress so that you were playing with each other, even when you weren’t doing so at the same time. AllDrive takes a different tack, signing up to six racers into its open world, and breaking down all the barriers between solo and online play.
The joy of Rivals’ structure is that it encourages you to just drive around and explore, finding hidden tracks and daredevil, chasm-spanning jumps, or just enjoying the feel of high-speeds on the open road. Meanwhile, the advantage of point-to-point, open-road racing over the courses you’d find in a more serious racing sim is that you can’t learn the tracks. Instead, you learn how to respond to sudden changes of direction, pitch or camber, and how to push each car to the edge of its performance. The result is an arcade racer where everything flows, whether you’re simply racing your way from checkpoint to checkpoint.

   It’s furiously addictive, too. Each career is divided into chapters, and each chapter has you moving through the cop or racer ranks by completing several to do lists of objectives, that might be as simple as just getting silver in a time trial event, or as tricky as hitting five racers with pursuit tech upgrades. Completing lists and ranking up unlocks new cars, liveries, events and upgrades, and it’s not long before you’re trapped in a cycle of competing to get a new car and new upgrades, then seeing what you can do with your new car, then working again to go up the next level.

 

      Is it faultless? Nope, and a lot depends on how much you’re frustrated by the occasional technical problems. At one point I lost connection to our shared game, dropping us mid-event back into a single player game world, and forcing  to find and start the event again. It can also be annoying to be a whisker away from winning when some clown comes out of nowhere and – whether by accident or design – smacks you clean off the road. A handful of objectives are peculiarly difficult to manage, and sometimes you wish the cops would just leave you alone while you finish your time trial or race.

     Yet, overall Need for Speed: Rivals is everything you might want from an arcade racer. It’s ridiculously fast, ridiculously thrilling and a wonder to play.