“Efficient” isn’t a word typically used to describe a Need for Speed game, but it’s the most fitting for Need for Speed: Rivals. Whereas 2010’s Hot Pursuit revived the spirit of cops against racers and 2012’s Most Wanted took us back to the open-world bliss of Burnout Paradise, Rivals feels like a careful arrangement of the best ideas from those two games (and delicately leaves 2011’s The Run as a curious outlier). Coming from a new studio, Ghost Games, comprised largely of former Criterion folk, its efficient disposition shouldn’t come as a surprise. The revelation comes in how well Criterion’s past harmonizes with Ghost’s daring vision of Need for Speed’s future.
Narrative has always felt a little impractical in the Need for Speed series. While we can all sit back and chuckle at Razor Callahan’s mid-aughts shenanigans or the goofy premise surrounding The Run, it’s clear saying less was doing quite a bit more. Rather than an outlined narrative, Rivals obeys its past and opts for a theme; cops versus racers, and two different campaigns. Brief voiceovers spliced in between player levels paint racers as urban cowboys desperately attracted to owning the road. Cops, from the racer’s point of view, are portrayed as masters of excessive force and wrongful punishment, corrupt to their core. Cops, from their own point of view, see the racers as pests that need to be extinguished and masters of public safety. As both the cop and the racer campaigns progress voiceovers become weirdly aggressive and strangely paranoid, and eventually crawl into this unintentionally funny dueling drama. It’s kind of nuts, but it makes one thing clear; Rivals is about two disparate play styles.
Risk is the substance that binds cops and racers together. Rivals is built around an economy; Speed Points (SP). Engaging in assigned objectives or picking up spontaneous challenges in Rival’s racer campaign contributes to SP, and earning successive SP builds into a multiplier. The higher your multiplier, the more SP you’re worth when cops bust you. Racers can return to their hideout and bank their accumulated SP – or gamble it away building their multiplier. With standard races, evading police, and time attack sequence all qualifying as Rivals main racer events, there were plenty of ways to earn SP. As you may imagine, the barreling intensity at which I would do anything I could to make it back to my hideout was empowering when done properly and equally instructive (and simultaneously destructive) when I failed.
Cops, on the other hand, engage in a more deliberate play style. While they don’t carry the risk of losing SP, they are subject to different rules of the road. Hot pursuit events focus on busting every single racer in a particular race, whereas Interceptor tasks the cop with wrecking a single racer in a considerably short amount of time. Rapid Response may have been my favorite, as it operated as a time attack that penalized collisions and scraping walls. The theme is to drive safely, which is no easy feat when you run into seemingly random police chases or start some Initial D style drifts at 130mph down an off-ramp. Whereas racers have to buy each new car earned, cops, as part of the narrative, are outfitted with progressively beefier cars – the likes of which seem to cater directly to the police / undercover / enforcer styles of play.
Both campaigns start the player at level one. From there you’re presented with three different series of objectives each with their own style. A racer, for example might find one series that sets objectives as side ramming a cop, rear-ramming a cop, and evading a cop. Another completely different series in the same level tasks the player to bronze or silver some of Rival’s more concrete, race-like objectives or successfully use Pursuit Tech (Rival’s label for offensive and defensive abilities) in a race. There’s almost always a choice, which not only helps break the sense of monotony that’s crippled other racers, but also allows a preferred play-style to emerge. More often than not, Rivals lets you do as you like.
Concrete objectives are well in place, but messing around in Redview County is an urge Rivals caters to. Racers can strike up a race with any other racer randomly wheeling around the map, and cops can spontaneously engage hot pursuits with any racer they encounter. This makes Rivals open world feel distinctly more accessible, a sentiment that was left behind in 2010’s Hot Pursuit. It’s also good for inducing the spirit of pure competition – especially when one of the random racers is a real human being.
Both cops and racers can select between two offensive and defensive toys, known as Pursuit Tech, to attach to their car. Though a majority of these abilities are shared, racers have a few geared toward evasion while cops tend to focus on aggressive pursuit. Electrostatic Field acts as a jamming device while also acting as a shock shield against other cars. A standard EMP may have been the most fun, requiring a persistent missile-lock type mechanics in order to fire one off. Pursuit Tech can also be upgraded, consuming SP to increase range and effectiveness. One catch is that each car, which also must be purchased with SP, has its own unique Pursuit Tech, meaning you’ll have to unlock new layers of Pursuit Tech with every single car you use. SP isn’t really in short supply, especially once harder challenges with better payouts start appearing, but it does require a bit of consideration.
Rivals is also loaded with extraneous ways to earn SP. Ripping a page out from Most Wanted’s Fairhaven City, Redview County is littered with tiny things to do. Speed Cameras return to measure how quickly you can pass a certain point on the map, while Speed Zones do something similar with attaining a high speed over a large stretch of road. Creating a high score earns SP – and beating your friends, whose times are posted in a leaderboard fashion at each instance, nets even more. This synchronous approach to non-simultaneous multiplayer has been the heart of Need for Speed’s Autolog since Hot Pursuit, and it returns true to form in Rivals. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, really, as driving by a Speed Camera and seeing your buddy has just a slightly better time than you still lights the fire of competition. Multiply that by a half dozen friends and considerable number of Speed Cameras and Zones over a huge world and, well, Rivals isn’t short on competition.
Autolog, Criterion’s famed system of constantly comparing friend’s scores, solves offline multiplayer, but Rivals is also quick to make live competition an integral part of the experience. Dubbed AllDrive, it’s intended to further blur the line between solo and multiplayer gameplay. In fact, unless you deliberately disconnect your console, it’s the default mode Rivals boots into. Basically AllDrive is a multiplayer system that connects human players together in a shared world. You can proceed with objectives like normal or seek out other players and play with or against them. Most exciting were the times when I was in the middle of a pursuit and another human player would come barreling through out of nowhere. Sometimes we made a mess of things and one time I randomly busted a guy who was low on car health – but it was usually an appreciated instance of unprovoked interaction.
AllDrive also leaves plenty of room for spontaneous confrontation. Racers and cops, rivals eternal, are bound to get into a scuffle here and there. In my case that amounted to hounding a writer from Shacknews, performing a head on collision with him, and then engaging in a chase spanning half the map. As a racer my heat level rose and, as a cop, he was joined by other AI cops and the guy from GameTrailers who just happened to be passing through. My equipped Pursuit Tech granted me the ability to jam their devices and perform an EMP pulse, which I did in succession in an effort to escape their radar and dash away. The whole chase was wonderfully exhilarating, and at one point I was driving backwards with both of the other human players directly in front of me staring into my windshield. I tried quick 180’s, last-second swerves into oncoming traffic, and a ridiculous jump in an effort to break free. With the notice of my car not being able to sustain much damage and no repair shop in sight, I eventually crumbed and got arrested, but thrill of the chase was a reward enough on its own.
Rival’s laissez-faire approach to multiplayer isn’t without its faults. Lacking traditional structure and making little effort to curtail its considerable space, organizing traditional races can be kind of a pain. In fact the usual races in general leave a little to be desired, especially after considering most of Rivals is built around finding on-the-fly ways to sabotage your fellow man. On one hand it’s kind of disappointing, but on the other, gee whiz, how many pure racing games have we had? As long as Rivals obliges (I’m sorry) its need for speed, how much does it matter if more traditional objectives don’t fare so well?
If anything, Rival’s single player content appears to suffer under the weight of obliged multiplayer. Rubber-banding AI is always going to be a part of arcade racers, but the seamless nature of multiplayer draws a sharp line between human and AI players. There are some human players you’ll never catch (and will never catch you) due to either applied skill or a moderately upgraded car. AI racers, on the other hand, always follow the same routine. You’ll collide, they’ll jolt ahead, and you’ll repeat the process. How the details unfold is subject to change, but a pattern starts to emerge after a few hours of play. In some cases they’ll even perform 180 degree turns or swerve off to an off ramp at the last second every time, making the game considerably easier – and more boring – in the process.
Companion Apps are in style these days, and Rivals isn’t one to break that particular trend. Called Overwatch, it allows a person with a tablet (in our case, an iPad) to assist drivers in real time. Better, they can interact with anyone who’s a part of the current AllDrive group. Once I was involved in a police chase as a cop, and the Overwatch player called in a helicopter for better radar support and later plopped a roadblock in front of the guy I was trying to catch. He even restored 20% of my damaged car. There are checks in balances in place keeping the Overwatch player from spamming racers and cops with attacks or bonuses, and Overwatch itself is game all its own, complete with experience and systems unique to its mission.
Stylistically, Rivals shines. Part of that is undoubtedly to the fact that I played it on brand new hardware. The PlayStation 4 certainly does it plenty of favors, ensuring considerable detail at 1080p resolution. Leaves blew around in the wind, biplanes and hang-gliders passed overhead seemingly at random, and the usual details of explosive exhaust pipes, terrifying sparks, and bone-crunching crashes were well in place. This seems to indicate the series has made a smooth transition to the Frostbite 3 engine, although since I literally have no idea what switching to new engines entails I can’t honestly speak to that. One thing’s for sure, Rivals certainly comes of better looking and playing on Frostbite 3 than The Run did on Frostbite 2.
Redview County’s natural landscapes seemed to exhibit a more laid-back appeal than Fairhaven City’s urban trappings. Winding roads and sprawling highways appeared to take inspiration from the Pacific Northwest, while more open dust-fields looked like they were pulled straight out of nowhere Kansas. Burning oil fields and off-road accidents into giant lakes are also a part of Redview County’s landscapes. The geographical diversity and relatively tiny (in square miles) size of Redview County is kind of silly, but absolutely beneficial to its mission. Rest assured I still found plenty of monster jumps, concrete pipes, and at least one abandoned airfield to play around in, assuring Criterion’s usual playfulness has a home at Ghost Games as well.
Though Rivals is definitely an arcade-style racer, feedback given through Rivals’ selection of cars felt appropriately diverse. The typical progression of car unlocks lead me to Need for Speed mainstays including a rear-engine Porsche, bruising Charger, and the hulk-like power monster Corvette. It’s no sim, but there was enough variation between the cars to visually observe and haptically perceive a difference. If there’s any caveat it’s the weird, disorienting thing Rivals does after a particularly massive wreck. Your car reappears on screen pointing a seemingly random direction and for whatever reason the HUD goes AWOL for a few seconds. This lead to a couple instances where I was pointing in the wrong direction in the middle of a challenge. The justification of this is sound; “you screwed up, don’t screw up” and it sort of makes contextual sense, but it’s weirdly annoying in Rival’s framework.
Rivals serves as a refinement of ideas and principles established over the last three years. This can lead to a feeling of sameness bleeding over Rival’s rough edges while also serving as a condensed interpretation of modern Need for Speed. In this regard Rivals acts as a natural step forward, lessons learned and amended properly. For an annual franchise to arrive harder, better faster and stronger than the previous version is no easy feat, but for Need for Speed it’s increasingly becoming part of the game.
