My Review of Need for Speed: Heat

After hours of playing, finishing the campaign, collecting all the collectibles and mastering all the activities to unlock that coveted 488 Pista (BOY that took a long time to do). I feel like I’ve seen the ins and outs of this game and I want to share my experience for those of you that are on the fence on whether to buy it or not. I’m happy to say that Heat is a PROPER Need for Speed game, tailored for those who loved the older titles, while still feeling fresh and introducing some new ideas. It isn’t flawless, far from it, but it certainly is a whole bag of fun.

Graphics and visuals:
This is a pretty game, and I mean GORGEOUS. Gone are the poor Payback graphics that looked like a mobile game. NFS Heat looks like a significantly updated version of the already beautiful NFS 2015, with improved lighting and rain effects. On the flip side, like NFS 2015, this game is rather obsessed with everything being wet… so expect a lot of rain. The map is beautiful in the cities but rather bland looking outside of them on the countryside roads, not to mention Heat looks significantly nicer at night than it does during the daytime. Something about the lighting at night just looks amazing! (Pictures taken on an Xbox One X)

Gameplay:
Finally, a Need for Speed game that feels RIGHT. Ghost has finally found a good balance between grip and drift physics, allowing you to build your car either way and stay competitive. Drifting feels more technical than previous titles, but in a good way, race oriented cars will kick their tail out for a moment to rotate and point the front where you want, helping you immensely during turns. More drift oriented cars will drift longer allowing you to take sharp turns and hairpins with ease. Traffic will be PACKED at night - think Midnight Club 3 - you will be put into awkward situations where its almost impossible to get past the traffic, and races can get chaotic but it’s such a rush and makes it a challenge. Day and night work completely separately and you have the option on whether to play at daytime and earn money from races, or at night and earn REP to level up, and unlock the things you want to buy, or missions you want to play. Night is where the game gets really interesting, each night is its own session, you are able to repair your car only 3 times and if you get busted by the police, you lose all the REP you earned on that night and have to pay a large fine. To up the tension even higher, ‘high heat races’ are races that unlock at higher heat levels where the police become more aggressive, you cannot restart these races, and finishing first will reward you the best performance parts available, this game makes you take risks and it feels so much more tense because of it. Some of the problems I have are that the game has some balancing issues, basically every race has a recommended performance index (a number that tells how good your car is), however, sometimes even if you are within this recommended PI, sometimes one of the AI cars is MUCH faster, completely leaving you and the rest of the AI cars behind. Thankfully late into the game with faster cars, this doesn’t happen as much. Likewise for police chases where at low levels, it can be very hard to shake off the police, but in time your cars become fast enough to outrun them. Another problem is that I have encountered a LOT of crashes. Almost as many as the typical Bethesda release. I would encounter 3-4 crashes a day, and a few bugs to boot, it might be just me, but the game does feel like it released in beta. Lastly, you are able to join crews, similar to clubs in Forza Horizon, I didn’t find this to add much to the experience, but it is a welcome addition regardless. NFS Heat also features some famous NFS cars from the past, such as the M3 GTR from Most Wanted, or Eddie’s Skyline from NFS Undergound, the game truly feels like a celebration of 25 years of NFS, even having collectible decals with the logos from all the past titles. Cars are unlocked by leveling up although some cars are unlocked via collectibles and activities which is quite tedious to do. Still, better than placing them behind a paywall.

Story. I mean “Story”:
It’s a Need for Speed game, so none of us expected much out of this, but I feel it’s worth mentioning anyway considering just how unbearable it was to listen to anyone talk in Payback, or watching the cutscenes in 2015. Thankfully, Heat is a lot more toned down with it’s dialogue, it’ isn’t anything special but it’s bearable at the very least. The characters are run of the mill, it’s honestly hard to find anything to write about them, in fact I barely even remember all their names, but they were never the point of this game. The main story in this game is rather short, it should only take a few hours and you’ll have completed it.

Customization:
A big selling point for Need for Speed titles is always how extensively you can customize your cars and NFS heat excels in this regard, with a good selection of body modifications, rims, and visual effects such as tire smoke colors and you can even create custom exhaust notes! Customizing your cars can get addicting because there are so many options and no other game does this better than NFS in my opinion. You can even do this via an app ‘NFS Heat Studio’ that allows you to create your own builds and import them into your game! As for performance parts, gone are the terrible SpeedCards introduced in Payback and we are given a much better system, where you can simply buy the parts you want, or even swap engines, but beware, performance parts and especially engine swaps are very expensive.

Conclusion:
I’ve had an absolute blast with NFS Heat and I’m happy to say the series is back into form. I still have so many builds in mind but I keep spending all my money on performance parts! (dont worry, money is easy to earn especially later on). Despite some minor flaws Heat hits the nail on the head with its balanced physics and extensive customization, and its worth the 60 bucks in my books.