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.