Review: Need For Speed Heat (PlayStation 4)
Hustle by day and risk it all at night in Need for Speed Heat, a thrilling race experience that pits you against a city’s rogue police force as you battle your way into street racing’s elite.
Pros:
- Decent graphics.
- 32.72gb download size.
- Platinum trophy.
- Opening tutorial races.
- Pick your avatar and starting car.
- 3 difficulties-easy/medium/hard.
- Solo and online versions of the game world.
- Driving gameplay.
- 5 views-bumper/bonnet/close/far/very far.
- In-game cutscenes.
- Open world map.
- Drive and play how you want.
- Day/night. You race during the day for cash and race at night for rep and leveling up.
- Full car and character customisation.
- Car customisation is very deep as you can tweak everything from under car neons to paint jobs to exhaust noises sliders.
- Community-download/upload and apply skins.
- Garage-main hun where you customize, choose day/night.
- Burnout Paradise influenced.
- Billboards to find and smash.
- Street art to find and collect which then unlocks them for paint jobs.
- Can set routes and get a line on the map.
- The online version of the world allows you to race other players instead of the CPU.
- Rep-earn to rank up and unlock new items and cars. You earn rep faster at night doing cop chases.
- Events unlock over time.
- Daily challenges for rewards.
- Cop chases are back! You get told how many cars are chasing and you have to get away and go into cool down.
- Game World is huge and takes in many types of environments like a city, industrial, beaches, etc.
- In a race you get clear gates you must hit as you race.
- Drifting mechanic.
- Wide variety of characters.
- Fast travel to any discovered garages.
- Seeing a billboard or street art will put its location on the map.
- Cosmetic damage model.
- Can change the song when driving.
- Whilst driving you can do some basic tuning through the pop-up UI.
Cons:
- No in-car view with a dashboard etc.
- Blue screen crashes happened a few times.
- Crimgey character interactions.
- Driving feels floaty and unstuck.
- Slowdown occurs a lot.
- Loading times are long and when racing others in story races, has it all dragged out longer.
- Slow to start.
- After crashing the view goes back to default.
- UI is clunky in a way that makes it very easy to mess up or get lost in them whilst driving.
- Once online you cannot simply disconnect and need to reboot the game.
- Cars pop up on the finish screen.
- After doing your story tasks, you have to always go back to the garage before the next set of tasks will appear.
- Some races are difficult to make out the gates.
- Races can have a real pointless follow me to the start line thing that is way too long and just needless.
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Graphics - 8/108/10
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Sound - 7/107/10
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Accessibility - 7/107/10
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Length - 8/108/10
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Fun Factor - 8/108/10
Summary
Ea has bought Need For Speed back and is looking to reboot the best NFS game… Underground. Focusing more on street racing and tuning Heat does an alright job of sticking to the script, they take a lot of inspiration from Burnout Paradise to the point where you have to keep reminding yourself you are not playing paradise! The story is told you via in-game cutscenes and with this comes great cringe and robotic facial expressions, it is nice to have a character that actually talks, however, just a shame there’s little to talk about. Tuning as said is good, full of detail and the inclusion of player-created skins takes the pain out of customisation for the lazier of tuners. Cars are U locked as you progress but again I found myself getting my favorite car and then just pumping cash I to it, I had little desire or need to change cars. Need For Speed Heat is not the successor or reboot you wanted for underground. The music is just not up to scratch, the handling is loose and the game world whilst varied suffers from many of the problems paradise had. Rather than innovating the series, it has attempted to mash a couple of good games together and for that, the game ultimately falls down.
