Ecosystem doesn’t usually mean much in the context of a racing game, but a finely-tuned series of cooperative and dependent parts are what power Need for Speed’s engine. Rather than line its open world with disconnected mission markers and pop-up content, it assigns them all to one of five categories of “reputation” and then connects that reputation to members of your emerging race crew. Need for Speed is you, the road, and your crew—and the freedom to shift and move between them at will.
Certain facets of current-generation games are expected. Need for Speed is gorgeous and looks like a second-generation PlayStation 4 or Xbox One game should. Ventura Bay, Need for Speed’s open-world, fan-fiction interpretation of Los Angeles, is expansive, celebrates urban diversity, and is both straight-line and corner friendly. The handling models—models, plural, we’ll get to this later—behave with appreciable feedback, smoothly indicating what you should and shouldn’t be doing when you blow through a corner. As the premier racing title from one of the planet’s largest publishers, you should expect this from a Need for Speed game. What you shouldn’t expect (because it is insane) are glorious full-motion video (FMV) sequences sprinkled through its wild storyline.
Titles on the Sega CD and 3DO salted the Earth for FMV games for two solid decades. Actual footage of real people with marginally interactive sequences doomed Night Trap, Ground Zero Texas, Wirehead, and countless other titles into bargain-bin oblivion. 2015 has seen something of resurgence for this style of entertainment, with Her Story, Guitar Hero Live, and now Need for Speed embracing live humans over CG monsters. Maybe it’s the diminishing depth of the uncanny valley, or maybe it’s applied talent in contextually appropriate sequences. Whatever the case or reason, FMV fits neatly into Need for Speed’s framework.
Your eclectic crew is the centerpiece of Need for Speed, and it’s through these FMV sequences where you’ll encounter them. The game opens by railroading the player through a montage of meet-and-greet sequences shortly before it removes the leash to Ventura Bay. Spike is your irritating (on purpose) trust-fund dipshit vector to the rest of the crew. Later you meet Manu, a bruiser consumed with drifting cars, Amy, the wrench-turning gearhead who literally lives in a garage, and Robyn, who seems obsessed with collaborative performance driving. Need for Speed demands you earn reputation to impress your crew, and provides a variety of outlets to articulate that mission.
Ghost Games, the Criterion ex-pats who backed 2013’s Need for Speed Rivals, heavily invested in making these characters feel real. Need for Speed projects an idealized underground racing / street tuner lifestyle, and tagging along with your new crew is its means of expressing its ideals. Caffeine-addled twenty-somethings may seem like peculiar guides to the world of chaotic street racing, but Need for Speed’s unyielding commitment to this idea is what makes it all work.
Whether you want to view these sequences as intensely serious or remorseless camp, they never blink in their commitment to a craft. Ghost Games has even gone as far as making the player—or more specifically, the player’s car—an inclusive part of the crew. Advanced compositing techniques often place your heavily customized car seemingly inside FMV sequences, creating a tangible reason to suspend disbelief. As a protagonist, you’re still a mute white dude accepting the good-natured ribbing and friendly advice of your adopted crew, but it helps sell the implicit absurdity of Need for Speed’s world. No matter what, you can’t get away from these guys.
There’s something contemporary about Need for Speed’s projected world. Your crew frequently dialogues by saying words like, “bae,” “cray,” and “jelly” out loud. Practically every other FMV sequence is someone pulling you aside to either show you the latest sick-ass street racing video on their phone. Need for Speed’s loading screens are punctuated with blurbs from a fake Twitter service, complete with expected abuse of the English language. In the proper game this manifests with your crew frequently blowing up your phone with new races and challenges, and while they make it seem like a limited event, you don’t actually miss out on any content if you ignore them.
With all of that in mind, it’s hard not to feel disconnected from these characters. Granted, I am 32-years-old and a solid ten years past the time when I spent ten-thousand dollars applying a ridiculous engine to my Honda del Sol. The concept of friends gathering at hilarious urban locations, pounding Monster Energy, toasting Monster Energy, and performing more first-person fist bumps than you can handle is thoroughly alien to me. On the other hand, I was actually impressed at how well Need for Speed handles its female characters. Neither Robyn nor Amy are sexualized or abstract objects of pursuit for the main character. In any case, I can’t tell whether the production team was trying to make Need for Speed with sincerity or if everyone was in on the joke, which is probably an ideal scenario for FMV sequences in a videogame.
Thankfully, Need for Speed finds a way to make your crew integral to its systems. Each member idolizes a particular real-life legend of their respective scene; Spike, for example, is obsessed with speedy Porsche aficionado Magnus Walker while Robyn harbors an unyielding admiration for Chicago’s Risky Devil drift crew. More than just idols to ogle, all of the races and challenges scattered across Ventura Bay directly correlate to your reputation on the streets and with your crew. Spike’s speed races typically include check point races or top-three finishes. Amy usually hooks you with races that encourage modding your car beforehand. Manu’s the drift guy, and Robyn’s challenges demand collaborative or competitive group racing.
Everything you do is in the name of creating your reputation. Participating in any of your crew’s specific events spreads your reputation across five categories. Speed, style, crew, build, and outlaw all correspond to different members of your crew, and either engaging races targeted toward these categories or acting like a madman out on the street adds rep points to each one. There’s also a global rep score (more-or-less a player level) that acts as a gateway to more difficult races. Specific challenges are tied to gaining reputation with certain crew members, all the way until you hit the max reputation level of 50.
Need for Speed always has its foot on the reward pedal. This phenomenon is best observed during a casual race. If you match an opponent’s speed, you’ll receive corresponding speed reputation. If you slipstream someone, you’ll gain style reputation. If you’re racing with a heavily modified car, that counts for build reputation. If you slam into another car (or a cop, road sign, whatever) you get outlaw reputation for causing destruction. Every beat of Need for Speed’s pulse feels prepared to reward the player with something.
Standard checkpoint races and time trials conform to finishing first and hitting a predetermined time, but Need for Speed, ironically, isn’t always about going fast. Drifting is a huge part of the game, with many challenges demanding you reach a certain drift score (measured by how often you cleanly you drift around a turn) on a set course. Initially I found drifting kind of obtuse, as I couldn’t help myself from slamming into traffic, other racers, or against the wall. The latter is especially chaotic, as it instantly wipes whatever score you were currently accumulating. With time (and some tweaking of the handling model) I was drifting down narrow highway off-ramps and around hairpin turns with relative ease. At a certain point drifting—feathering the analog stick left and right in sync with the throttle—was closer to Mario Kart than a traditional racing game.
Need for Speed gets more interesting when it starts combining its challenges. Drift train sequences demand you drift in sync with other racers. The score you’re supposed to hit is kind of high, but you get a bonus multiplier when you’re in close proximity of your crew. In my experience I was still able to easily pass these events but, visually, they were an unmitigated disaster with crashes and spinouts everywhere. It worked, but it wasn’t picturesque. Touge races are similar, demanding a certain drift score, but add a score multiplier that increases on your way to first place. Three daily challenges, which can task the player with completing a specific race, drifting a certain distance, or racking up a huge police fine, are other ways to rack up reputation points.
Progression is vaguely non-linear. Exclusively doing Amy’s races, for example, will eventually exhaust her specific FMV sequences and actual races (although other characters frequently appear in everyone’s cut-scenes or phone chatter). Easy, medium, and hard flags also accompany each race. As the game progressed and my skills developed I was able to finish almost every sprint race and time trial in one-go, provided traffic never got in my way. Drifting was difficult until I got the hang of it, at which point I never had trouble with it again. It seems like the target drift scores are almost too low, and the system can almost be gamed by the player.
Traffic, a facet of Need for Speed since its inception, accounts for a major variable in play. I get why other cars are there—it’s an element of randomness to take into account and deal with as it happens—but sometimes their presence felt malicious! Oncoming traffic shines bright lights, and contending with that while going 170mph is am expected challenge, but surprise cars turning in front of you from side streets are fun poison at any speed. You’ll slam into them and wreck out and it sucks. Usually I could sustain one or two complete wrecks and still finish first in a race, so it wasn’t that bad, but you’ll feel the pangs of rage when it happens.
Regarding its challenge, Need for Speed feels like an aggressively designed game. It’s not so much straight racing as it is calculated ballet where the game always seems like its monitoring your opposition. Opponents will rubber-band forward without a moment’s notice, racing by at impossible speeds. This is annoying, but the game seems tuned to slow them back down during the last fifth of the race. Provided you don’t make any mistakes in this sort-of grace period, you can usually come out on top. Oddly, the AI is absolute trash sometimes, with everyone from normal cars to Ken Block frequently mishandling sharp turns and plowing into walls at speeds that would kill regular people. While the racing in Need for Speed might not be legitimate, it does feel fair, in its own way.
Because Ghost Games had to put an incredible amount of effort into seemingly everything, car customization—visually and mechanically—is another area where Need for Speed excels. Expected visual cues are in place; you can adjust the rims, how far the rims protrude, what sort of wheels are on the rims, and what kind of decals and stickers are applied to the paint above the rims. This philosophy applies to the entire car, which can either be decorated piece-meal with decals, or wrapped in custom or pre-defined skins as a total package. In this regard Need for Speed has finally caught up with the aesthetically expansive Forza series, perhaps even lapping it once along the way.
Customization also applies to the myriad of go-fast parts, suspension accessories, and other gizmos inside of the vehicle. Some of these are standard pieces we’ve been upgrading and updating since Gran Turismo; flashing the ECU, bolting on a thirsty cold-air intake, signing up for greater levels of forced induction, and adding magic nitrous oxide are expected and accounted for. More nuanced options, like adjusting shift differentials or switching out cylinder heads, allow you to make specific adjustments to the car’s handling models are also included, but it’s tough to pay attention to something that doesn’t directly respond by boosting your horsepower number.
It’s easy to get lost in the details of control, but there’s no denying that Need for Speed, as a series, has a variable approach to car handling. Black Box’s games always leaned toward traditional racing, whereas Criterion’s contributions where very drift-friendly. Neither met the extreme ends of Gran Turismo or Ridge Racer, respectively, but there was a tangibly different approach in handling philosophy. Need for Speed, against all odds, accounts for both styles of play. Adjusting a car’s handling model is a completely different menu from performance upgrades, and it allows you to perform actions (like lowering tire pressuring or adjusting driver assists) that move a slider from drift-friendly to traditionally grippy. Need for Speed makes room for both worlds.
With that in mind, the more traditional handling model felt like it was at a disadvantage. So many events feature drifting as an integral part of the challenge, and even though you can utilize the handbrake as a drift substitute on non-compliant vehicles, it feels like a Band-Aid on the issue. Short of returning to your garage and subbing out a drift car whenever the need demands, the traditional handling model might get left in the dust.
While Need for Speed contains truckloads of real-world vehicles, the collect ’em all mentality that fueled games like Most Wanted is not present. Members of the development team on-hand at our preview event stressed that any car could stay competitive provided you kept up with performance upgrades. In fact, your garage only has space for five vehicles, ensuring a stable of highly powered machines prefers quality to quantity. I divided my early time with Need for Speed between a Honda Civic Type R (as a starting vehicle) and later upgraded to a late 90’s Toyota Supra. I finished the game with a Lamborghini Aventador with horsepower that I pushed well past 1000. It’s tough to say how different the cars feel. Playing with the handling models, I made all of my rides slippery drift machines with detectable differences in exhaust noise. There was a certain pleasure in absolutely reaming hundred thousand dollar automobiles up and down the street, even if they didn’t change how I played.
Multiplayer, branded in Need for Speed’s long running AllDrive interface, makes another curious appearance. Similar to Rivals, other players will always populate Ventura Bay. Need for Speed requires an online connection to play, though your interaction with other people remains (mostly) optional. Fellow racers can either be located on the map and engaged for a one-on-one race, or co-opted by proximity into almost every proper race in the main game. If you and your friends all start the same race at the same time, for example, they’ll be in the race. There are dozens of other named AI racers prowling Ventura Bay, and you’ll run into them frequently either by luck or their sporadic appearances in other races. Like past Need for Speed games, your friends’ (or frequently encountered players’) best times on every challenge will be seamlessly matched and ranked against your times on every race.
The multiplayer interface wasn’t without its assorted hijinks. You occupy Ventura Bay exclusively from dusk to dawn (racer culture and vampires have similar activity schedules), leaving little normal traffic on the roads. The exception appears to be other real people, who can be found zooming along at impossible speeds. This can create real havoc, especially when two of you heading opposite directions collide in the midst of a hectic challenge. It’s worth noting the AI is affected by this as well; once, during a group race with Robyn, another player’s race crossed our path. A dozen cars heading opposite directions at full speed created a veritable demolition derby—and I went on to win the race. It worked out well for me, but Robyn was totally obliterated.
Did Need for Speed need to be always online? It’s a question worth asking. Understand the principles of why it’s required; since Burnout Paradise and to a lesser extent 2010’s Hot Pursuit, these games have been aggressively focused on challenging your friends’ top scores. Need for Speed doesn’t make multiplayer a central idea like Most Wanted or the aforementioned Burnout Paradise, but it doesn’t overly harass you with it either. I sympathize with consumers who may not want to be (or just can’t be) always online, but this appears to be the road going forward. For what it’s worth, I played 95% of the game “by myself,” and barely noticed everyone else around me. The only thing that really bugged me was the lack of any ability to pause the game to itch your face or answer the door or do literally anything else until a race is finished.
Police make an understated return. Cops are either patrolling or stationed with radar guns at set points around Ventura Bay. If you’re caught speeding you have the opportunity to pull over and pay a paltry fine. I never did this. Instead I sped up and engaged in a police chase. The longer you give chase, the higher fine you start racking up. Police can increase in intensity, but losing them didn’t appear to be too much of an issue. Either I would get a significant lead on them and find some out-of-the-way alley to hide in, or ram into one and slow it down. This leads to a cool down timer, and once the countdown is complete you’re usually rewarded with a ton of outlaw rep.
It’s worth mentioning that police are kind of broken. Ideally, you’re always going fast in a high speed pursuit, and the challenge is trying to lose the cops with pure speed or tricky cornering. Daily challenges that demanded I rack up a high fine or maintain a pursuit for five minutes lead me to discovering other avenues of victory. I found that if I plopped down the highway at 18mph, a cop could never catch me. They would always ram into the wall to block me off, but they would never stop me. Likewise, when I was challenged to get a high fine, I repeatedly rammed a police car then pulled a U-turn and re-rammed said car over and over again. This goes against the spirit of the game, sure, but it never fought me back, so I was never incentivized to do anything else.
There’s actually a fifth member of your crew that corresponds to outlaw reputation (the identity of whom Need for Speed prefers to keep under wraps). Early on, rather than mark specific events, this person texts you with abstract challenges, like enduring a two minute police chase or blowing through several breakable blockades. Eventually the “outlaw” challenges start manifesting on the world map, usually consisting of normal challenges with the additional modifier of having a ton of police on your tail.
A few other tasks round out Need for Speed’s activity list. You can challenge any encountered racer to a face-off at any time, and doing so with every car checks said car off a list. Free car parts are on parked pick-up trucks scattered across Ventura Bay. Likewise, certain photo-op points can be found and collected. More curious are donut opportunities, which function as a collectible but require the player to spin a massive donut in the designated area first. This isn’t possible with front-wheel drive vehicles, which, I get why, but it was kind of a pain to find a donut point and then not be able to check that off the list when I was in my Civic.
Need for Speed seeks to strike a balance between expectations and surprise. Facets fans have been asking for years—better customization, diverse handling models, competitive visuals, assorted race challenges, and cohesive persistence—are in place. These are the things that you expect, and Need for Speed delivers.
From this point, Need for Speed divides down two lines. Either you’re a (presumably) teens or early twenty’s male new to driving and curious about the world of underground street racing. You think these cut-scenes are sincerely cool, and on par with the first two Fast and Furious moves in their depiction of underground street racing.
The other side, of course, lies with those of us in our late twenty’s and beyond who have been playing games for years and can’t quite connect with the cultural aspects of the game. There’s a certain, How do you do, fellow kids? feel to the whole thing, and it merits appreciation on a completely different level. Every first-person fist bump, group Monster energy toast, or time someone said “hashtag” out loud I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. It’s distressingly serious and I savored every second of it.
