Need for Speed Collection

Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012 – PC

Vehicles glide along invisible roads in the sky. Cars are borne out of twitchy, twisty clouds of darkness. Groups of police cruisers perform coordinated donuts, twirling about like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. In the creative and unusual pre-race sequences throughout Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you get the sense that the city of Fairhaven is a surreal land with dreamlike logic that might allow anything to happen at any moment. It’s striking, then, that the actual game here is so typical and unsurprising, and that although it delivers plenty of the hard-hitting, white-knuckle racing Criterion is known for, it doesn’t do so quite as well as some of the studio’s earlier games.

The first game Need for Speed: Most Wanted may make you think of isn’t a Criterion game at all; it’s Need for Speed Most Wanted, the 2005 game with almost the same name. But while both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, the similarities aren’t as significant as you might expect. One of the earlier game’s most memorable elements was its hilariously over-the-top tale, told using some cheesy cutscenes, of a newcomer to the city of Rockport who has a personal vendetta against local street racer Razor Callahan. The premise gave you a terrific motivation for rising through the ranks of Rockport’s street racing scene and taking Razor down.

Here, you also have the goal of defeating a number of street racers, but there’s no narrative to back it up. The 10 racers on your list are identified only by their cars–they don’t have names or faces or personalities–and without a personal investment in defeating them, doing so isn’t nearly as satisfying here as it was in the 2005 game. It is merely a structural hoop to jump through; you do it simply because the game tells you that this is what you are supposed to do.

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Need For Speed Shift – PC

Need for Speed Shift looks an awful lot like the classic arcade game Pole Position. If you’re expecting sunlight glinting off your car’s hood and plumes of particle-rendered exhaust, you’re bound to be let down. The car sprites are tiny, and the road itself takes up only about a fourth of the game’s screen, leaving a lot of viewing area unused. The music isn’t all that impressive, either. The tinny, repetitive music occasionally sounds like a bunch of yowling cats. Each stage has its own background music, but you’ll quickly want to switch to the radio or a CD instead.

Fortunately, while the graphics and sound are problematic, pretty much everything else in the game works just fine. You’ll face 24 separate events, with seven different types of races, including straight circuits, drift runs, elimination rounds, and head-to-head face-offs. Between races, you can use your winnings to purchase new cars and upgrades like nitro boosts and better aerodynamics.

One crucial component of each race is earning style points, which you pick up by drifting (precision points) or ramming opponents (aggression points). You can earn more stars in each race by showing off, but it’s possible to beat the game without relying on them. You have to earn a lot of style points to get extra stars, so this side challenge is for expert racers only.

Need for Speed Shift handles well, too. The game has responsive touch controls and a fun drifting “bar” onscreen that you have to center as you powerslide around turns. The game even lets you slipstream behind cars for a speed boost.

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Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed – PC

Shift 2: Unleashed is a highly challenging and exciting racing game which improves greatly on its predecessor. New features, such as the first-person helmet cam and the reworked graphics engine, make the driving seat a more thrilling place to be than it was in the first game. However, the car handling continues to tread the line between arcade and simulation, without mastering either. While Shift 2 turns the corner from full simulation, a compelling single-player Career mode, great online features and new Autolog integration make it an exciting and well-rounded package overall.

Shift 2 begins very much like the original, with a quick two-lap practice session to help it decide what difficulty level and which driving assists you require. Keeping your car out of the grass and away from the barriers becomes considerably more difficult as you turn off the assists, which means you can increase the challenge as you progress. However, Shift 2 is definitely not a true simulation of driving. The cars have a tendency to understeer in fast corners and oversteer in slow ones. This makes the game more exciting, allowing for big slides and a frantic pace, but it can also cause frustration if you prefer pure simulation, because it’s difficult to predict your car’s behaviour. Faster cars behave inconsistently at the same turn on different laps, so consistent lap times can be elusive. The game doesn’t have a rewind feature, which adds to the frustration if you crash during one of the longer races at the end of the Career mode. The unpredictable handling means you may need to spend a lot of time tweaking the advanced control options as well, especially when using a wheel and pedals because the default settings just aren’t responsive enough.

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NFS Collector’s Series – PC

COLLECTORS SERIES INCLUDES: *Need For Speed Underground Electronic Arts Need For Speed series takes a note from the Fast and Furious handbook with its latest release entitled Need For Speed Underground. Purchase, race, and customize 20 different licensed cars from major manufacturers such as Honda, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Volkswagen, Nissan, and more. Race other customized cars through a detailed nighttime cityscape, dodging city traffic and navigating shortcuts all the while. Customize vehicle performance as well as your cars physical appearance, changing rims, stickers, paintjob, spoilers and more. Multiple racing modes range from drift competitions, street racing, and drag racing. Breathtaking graphics showcase the power of next generation systems, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. *Need For Speed Ungerground 2 Need for Speed Underground 2 will challenge gamers to immerse themselves in the tuner culture, exploring an expansive, free-roaming city divided into five distinct neighborhoods. Gamers will encounter rival racers who will initiate events, tip players off to the hottest racing spots, and show them where to buy the most sought-after licensed aftermarket upgrades. The game will feature new game modes, deep new performance customization and tuning, and more than 30 licensed cars. The game also delivers twice the visual customization upgrades as the original game, providing a staggering 70 billion possible car combinations for total automotive self-expression. *Need For Speed Most Wanted The new speedster in EAs successful series combines the tuner customization of Need for Speed Underground with an expanded take on the police chases of the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit series. The game will feature a Rap Sheet option that works hand in hand with a players street reputation as they move up from the Black List to the A-List. Users will also be able to go head-to-h

 

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Need For Speed Undercover – PC

For the most part, the reaction to the last few Need for Speed games was the same: “Why aren’t they more like Need for Speed Most Wanted?” “Where are the cheesy cutscenes and the over-the-top cop chases?” It seems as if EA heard those cries, because for better or for worse, Need for Speed Undercover feels like Most Wanted.

In Undercover you play the role of…wait for it…an undercover officer. Along with agent Chase Linh, played by the attractive Maggie Q, your job is to take down a group of street racers that have somehow become involved in an international smuggling ring. The story is told via campy cutscenes that fail to capture the charm of Most Wanted thanks to uninteresting characters and a predictable plot. Having a story provides incentive to make it through race after race, but the whole “this is cheesy so it’s cool” thing feels kind of forced this time around.

Like many other Need for Speed games, all of your racing will take place on the streets of a fictitious open-world city–here it’s the Tri-City Bay area. You’ll start with a lousy vehicle, but it won’t be long before you’re able to snag a pink slip to a nicer ride. As you progress you’ll earn cash, which can be used to unlock (50+) new vehicles from manufacturers such as Nissan, Dodge, Cadillac, Ford, Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW, Aston Martin, Mitsubishi, and more. If you’re into tuning individual aspects of your ride or purchasing individual parts you can do that, but if you’re not into tinkering you can purchase an upgrade package and be on your way.

Not only will you earn money for winning an event, you’ll earn driving points for dominating it–basically beating it really, really bad. You can power up a number of your driving attributes, but they don’t have a noticeable effect on how your car handles. As long as you drive fast you’ll probably dominate, but there are occasional races where you’ll totally obliterate the time needed to dominate an event, but you’ll still lose to the CPU. The game also encourages you to drive with style and drift, draft, and drive really close to other cars, but other than increasing your nitrous there’s little to gain from doing so. That said, the new J-Turn mechanic, which lets you bust quick 180s, is invaluable when chasing down rivals or evading the cops. You’ll use it because it’s useful, though, not because it gets you heroic driving points.

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Need For Speed Pro Street – PC

It can’t be easy to be a game developer in charge of releasing a new game in a series every year. People don’t want the same game over and over, yet they’re unhappy if the game strays too far from the established formula. EA deserves credit for trying something different with Need for Speed ProStreet, but the new direction of the series fails to live up to the level of the previous games. There’s still a solid racing experience here, and the online component of the Xbox 360 is quite good; but the game’s premise is uninteresting and the in-game advertising is over the top. In the end, ProStreet is just another decent but uninspired racing game.

Unlike the last two Need for Speed games, which told the story of an underground street racer through campy yet entertaining cutscenes, ProStreet follows the legal street racing career of Ryan Cooper. The game still uses cutscenes to try to instill some story into the proceedings–something about Ryan getting dissed by a big-time street racer–but it’s uninteresting thanks to terrible voice acting and unlikable characters. Ignoring the story, it’s your goal to head to different events, dominate them, challenge the best of the best, and then take on Ryo, the man who disrespected you after your first race.

Thanks to the sheer number of race days you’ll need to win, it will take a long time to get to Ryo. Each race day consists of a number of different events. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who’s played previous Need for Speed games. Grip races are standard races with eight cars on the track, and your goal is to finish first. Other events have you trying to get the fastest time or highest speed through checkpoints, or the best time out of your class of cars. Drift racing is back, but has been revamped and is actually fun this time around since you don’t lose all your points for going off the track. You’ll also be doing a lot of drag racing. It’s fun for a bit, but gets old quickly thanks in no small part to the preceding minigame in which you have to heat up your tires–it’s lame, and you have to do it before each of the three rounds. While there’s no shortage of events, there isn’t a whole lot of variety. Many of them feel the same–you just want to go fast. This makes the game grow old quickly, a problem when there are so many events to slog through before you reach the end.

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Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012 – PC

Vehicles glide along invisible roads in the sky. Cars are borne out of twitchy, twisty clouds of darkness. Groups of police cruisers perform coordinated donuts, twirling about like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. In the creative and unusual pre-race sequences throughout Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you get the sense that the city of Fairhaven is a surreal land with dreamlike logic that might allow anything to happen at any moment. It’s striking, then, that the actual game here is so typical and unsurprising, and that although it delivers plenty of the hard-hitting, white-knuckle racing Criterion is known for, it doesn’t do so quite as well as some of the studio’s earlier games.

The first game Need for Speed: Most Wanted may make you think of isn’t a Criterion game at all; it’s Need for Speed Most Wanted, the 2005 game with almost the same name. But while both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, the similarities aren’t as significant as you might expect. One of the earlier game’s most memorable elements was its hilariously over-the-top tale, told using some cheesy cutscenes, of a newcomer to the city of Rockport who has a personal vendetta against local street racer Razor Callahan. The premise gave you a terrific motivation for rising through the ranks of Rockport’s street racing scene and taking Razor down.

Here, you also have the goal of defeating a number of street racers, but there’s no narrative to back it up. The 10 racers on your list are identified only by their cars–they don’t have names or faces or personalities–and without a personal investment in defeating them, doing so isn’t nearly as satisfying here as it was in the 2005 game. It is merely a structural hoop to jump through; you do it simply because the game tells you that this is what you are supposed to do.

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Need for Speed Hot Pursuit – PC

Hot Pursuit is a Need for Speed game in name only. This blisteringly fast racer has more in common with developer Criterion Games’ own Burnout series than it does with any previous Need for Speed offering, despite lacking a number of features that are commonly associated with Burnout games. This isn’t a game in which you’re rewarded for crashing spectacularly or for jumping through billboards, but it is a game that encourages you to drive dangerously and to take down your opponents by any means necessary. The option to play both as illegal racers and as the cops that are chasing them brings some much-needed variety to the action, while spike strips, road blocks, and other satisfying countermeasures ensure that Hot Pursuit doesn’t feel quite like any racer that you’ve played before. Regardless of whether your interest in Hot Pursuit stems from a love of Need for Speed, Burnout, or neither, you won’t be disappointed.

If you’re familiar with the Burnout series, you’ll immediately feel at home with the handling in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Licensed cars from the likes of Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and Porsche can be made to slide around corners with only the briefest of touches on the brake, and you earn nitrous by driving dangerously close to other vehicles and into oncoming traffic. Furthermore, there are plenty of shortcuts available if you stray from the Seacrest County roads, and should you wreck your ride while attempting to take one, you’re treated to a glorious slow-motion shot as panels buckle and debris starts to fly. A similar slow-motion treatment is used to alert you when additional cops show up to chase you down and when you successfully take out an opponent, which adds a welcome touch of Hollywood to these high-speed chases. Not that they need it.

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Need For Speed Carbon – PC

Aficionados of scrappy, arcade-style racing games will feel right at home with Need for Speed Carbon for the Nintendo DS. While the DS game doesn’t include all of the features that its counterparts on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox have, it does ape enough of their features and atmosphere such that it delivers the same sort of spirited street-racing experience. Beyond that, it’s also a fun, sometimes-hectic game that gives players a good selection of cars, parts, and courses to fiddle with.

Generally speaking, Carbon is set up like you’d expect it to be. You compete against opponents in various circuit, elimination, sprint, and endurance-type races; new courses and cars unlock along the way; and your victories net you points that you can use to buy new cars and upgrade your old ones. Each of the game’s 12 courses emphasizes a different setting and structure, and you’ll find shortcuts all over the place. The driving is fast-paced, and the cars feel sufficiently heavy. The artificial intelligence, meanwhile, does a good job of nudging fenders without coming across as unfair. Smashing into oncoming traffic can lead to a spectacular crash, but the AI usually isn’t so harsh that one or two collisions will knock you out of contention. At least CPU opponents are subject to the same mishaps, unlike in last year’s game when they would simply pass right through commuter traffic. As for the controls, everything you’d want at your fingertips is there. Steering is mapped to the directional pad; the shoulder buttons handle braking and acceleration; and the main buttons activate the handbrake, wingman, and nitro functions.

Three exciting new gamebreaker features help distinguish Carbon from previous Need for Speed games. Two of these are rewind and slow-motion abilities, which let you recover from crashes and slow down the action just by pressing a button. The other, more significant new addition is the wingman. In a nutshell, you have a buddy in the race that will come to your aid with a helpful block or draft whenever you summon them. Blockers will try to nudge and T-bone the other CPU cars. Drafters, on the other hand, will get in front of you and cut down on your car’s wind resistance, helping you achieve a higher top speed. They also refill your nitrous, rewind, and slow-mo tanks while you draft behind them. Wingmen are a welcome addition to the Need for Speed formula, as they can instigate some awesome crashes and change the pecking order in an instant. About the only downside to them is that you can’t have both a blocker and a drafter in a single race. You must pick one or the other before the race starts. As such, you have to decide which strategy is more important, slowing down the other competitors or being able to refill your nitro, rewind, and slo-mo tanks.

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Need For Speed The Run – PC

There’s a whole lot of America between San Francisco and New York City. Need for Speed: The Run’s greatest achievement is the way it sometimes captures the thrill of hitting the open road and experiencing the varied beauty of the American landscape, from the mountains and the prairies to the small towns and skyscrapers. Unfortunately, issues arise that sap some of the momentum from your cross-country trek, but The Run spends enough time doing what it does best to remain an enjoyable journey.

You play as Jack Rourke, a racer who has gotten in way over his head with the mob. His friend Sam promises an end to his problems if he can win a cross-country street race and the huge payout that comes with victory. Sadly, The Run’s attempts to make you care about Jack’s plight fall flat. The talents of actors Sean Faris and Christina Hendricks as Jack and Sam are wasted; their voices emanate from character models with mouths that move oddly and faces that express no emotion. What’s more, the story doesn’t even make sense. Certain rivals whom you pass early in the race show up again when you’re in the home stretch. Thankfully, after an early cutscene that sets up the premise, the game wastes little time with its flimsy storytelling and lets you focus on driving.

The cars in The Run feel good to drive. The wide range of vehicles on offer includes sports cars that respond tightly to your every command and muscle cars that are tough to tame, but regardless of what you’re driving, racing in The Run is about balancing speed with control. Sure, you’ve got highways on which you can gun the throttle and cruise at top speed, but more often than not, you’re on stretches of road with some tricky turns. Using your brakes effectively, maintaining a smart racing line, and speedily exiting the turns is crucial to maintaining a good time, and it feels great to put these powerful cars through their paces.

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Colin McRae Dirt 2 – PC

In Dirt 2, you assume the role of an up-and-coming race driver who’s competing on the off-road circuit against such pros as Ken Block and Travis Pastrana for the first time. That’s a daunting prospect, but one of the many great things about Codemasters’ latest racer is that you can have a lot of fun with it and end the lengthy Dirt Tour career mode a champion regardless of your skill level. Your opponents aren’t pushovers; in fact, they put up a believable fight from start to finish, but the vehicle handling and damage is forgiving, the difficulty level can be altered before every event, and a slick flashback feature gives you the option to instantly replay portions of a race if you make a mess of it. Dirt 2 isn’t as realistic as some of the other excellent off-road racers that have come before it, but it’s as accessible and exciting as any of them.

Your career gets off to an auspicious start when you’re presented with your first car: a Subaru Impreza that belonged to the late, great Colin McRae. Like all of the 35-plus cars in the game, its performance is measured in ratings from one to 10 for acceleration, top speed, and handling. Your rides are relatively slow as your career gets underway, but as you move up through the ranks, you get to upgrade them; not one part at a time, but with the purchase of kits designed for different event types. Those upgrades are mandatory, but you also have the option to tinker with settings before each race, and the good news is that even if you don’t know your downforce from your differential, there’s a good chance that you can do so with some success. That’s because there are only seven variables, which are all clearly explained to you, and there are only five different settings for each. It’s not deep, but it’s fun to play around with, and any changes that you make are immediately noticeable once you get behind the wheel.

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Driver San Francisco – PC

Chasing down crooks in high-speed chases, performing death-defying feats of driving, or bringing down entire criminal organisations might be a bit much for your average cop, but Driver: San Francisco’s John Tanner takes it in his stride. As you take control of him and begin your beat on the mean streets of San Francisco, the reason why becomes clear: Tanner’s uncanny ability to “shift” into the body of citizens lets you do things other cops can’t, such as instantly drive any vehicle in the city, coax case clues from criminal passengers, or use cars as battering rams, to name but a few. While the premise behind this ability is ludicrous, it all makes sense as you soar over the living, breathing city for the first time, instantly transporting yourself to new missions and swiftly jumping between cars to take down criminals. Shifting is Driver’s coup de grace; the feature that puts memories of the mediocre Driver 3 to rest and reinvigorates the franchise.

Driver: San Francisco picks up where Driv3r left off; it continues the story of Tanner and criminal mastermind Jericho. After escaping from Istanbul, Jericho takes refuge in San Francisco, only to be tracked down and imprisoned. However, a routine prison transfer gives him the opportunity to escape. Tanner gives chase and–after an explosion-filled action scene of Michael Bay proportions–catches up with the criminal, only to be run down and left in a coma. It’s in Tanner’s coma-induced dreams that Driver takes place; the battle against his coma manifests itself as the hunt for Jericho and real-life news reports on the TV in his hospital room influence his actions. While the narrative is completely implausible and at times downright confusing, it allows Driver to free itself from the shackles of the real world and introduce the unique shift mechanic that underpins the entire game.

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Test Drive Unlimited 2 – PC

Though it is dubbed “Unlimited”, a developer has to be selective when making something as huge and ambitious as Test Drive Unlimited 2. In extensively re-creating the island of Ibiza for its open-world, online driving game, Eden games presumably had to give up foam parties and club-addled tourists at an early stage. The omissions are few, however. TDU2 is a smorgasbord of open-road driving, single- and multiplayer challenges, exploration, social features, car collecting, and luxury lifestyle trappings, played out on 3,000km of road modeled on the real island–and that’s before you unlock Oahu, the Hawaiian island on which the first game was set. Quality, not quantity, is TDU2′s occasional issue; uneven handling and visual and online hitches hold it back. But though its shortcomings are offset by the sheer wealth of content, the game’s real saving grace is the combined experience: the pleasure of cruising the open road and the satisfying tick of progress through the collection, discovery, competition, and social categories.

Competition is the most structured of the game’s categories, based around the Solar Crown championship: a set of classic, asphalt, and off-road contests made up of race, speed, and time trial events. In the competition events there’s a stab at a story and characters–it’s bland stuff, but puts a face on the racers in the other cars and sets up rivalries between you and the star driver in each class. How taxing you find the events, as with driving throughout the game, depends on your choice of vehicle handling. Full assistance is all-forgiving, hardcore is demanding, with sport mode pitched in-between, but none quite satisfy. Though the inconsistent hardcore handling is tough to master, it doesn’t serve up the simulation-like experience promised, with cars feeling too light. The other handling modes are less exacting but no more convincing–less twitchy, but a not-very-happy medium between simulation and arcade racer.

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