Need For Speed: Rivals has everything a belligerent motorhead wants: a great selection of cars, gadgets, head-to-head races, high-speed
chases, a questionable resentment of authority and, of course, free roam.
However if you’re a guy like me who has never invested in NFS until this
iteration, fans will probably scoff at your enthusiasm for this title and say
you’re 4 years late, since Hot Pursuit is essentially the same concept. This
being a sequel however, there are a few differences.
For starters, the game is always online. I’m not sure why
any dev or publisher thinks this is ever a good idea, because it’s not, and it
never will be. As reliant as the world is on the Internet these days, we still
need to acknowledge that it is a technology created by humans, meaning that at
one point or another it’s going to fuck up. Nothing in this game is worse than
being tailed by five cops as you’re flying down the highway dodging every car,
tree and blade of grass that’ll cause a serious collision, and your
adrenaline-induced trance is abruptly halted by host migration. Majority of the
time other players aren’t even necessary; there’s always far more AI opponents
than humans. So why is this game always online? I’m not sure, but this is EA we’re dealing with, so not much
sense should be expected here.
On the other hand, the new multiplier system is pretty
sweet. Typically in a game like this you’d earn cash to buy your way through
everything, but instead there’s an extra twist that rewards being the ballsiest
bastard of Redview County. The more challenges you complete as a racer, the
more points you rack up and increase your multiplier, which will make acquiring
more points easier, but it comes at a price; your heat level increases along
with it, meaning cops will come down that much harder on you in a chase. The
only way to keep these points is to make it to a hideout and bank them for
later use. It’s an excellent concept of risk vs. reward that takes an already
exuberant premise and pumps two kegs of NOS up your nostrils; extreme, but
heartbreaking once you know the feel of losing 200,000 points. Or in the case
of the previous analogy, your life.
As a racer you have to be the best of the best to make it in
Redview County. So what’s the purpose of playing as a cop, you ask? To
completely wreck every racer you see, and that’s pretty much it. While a simple
and repetitive objective, it just never gets old; there’s always a great sense
of pride in taking out a racer who thinks he/she is the bees knees and you
crush their aspirations with your superior driving skills. Cops also don’t have
to buy their cars, which is a plus, though renders accumulative points a bit
arbitrary since they don't incorporate performance upgrades and gadgets never cost that much.
NFS: Rivals is a few things: cheesy, thrilling, maddening,
and somewhat misguided – but if you’re a fan of arcade racers you can’t go
wrong with picking up a copy.
