NFS Heat's Graphics are kinda superior than Payback but it's not as like-like than the 2015 reboot. But I don’t think I’d ever get anywhere, because I think the destination I want to reach is just a small fraction of the game that Ghost Games made with Heat.Need for Speed Heat is (imo) one of the best racing games of the 2010's First up, The Graphics I could chase them for hours, for days, and I know I’m supposed to. So even though I can catch glimpses of greatness in Need for Speed: Heat, I know that by both design and execution, they are mirages. It feels like what it is: a glitching video game in a slightly uninspired setting. Need for Speed Heat sometimes looks beautiful, but struggles with draw distances, pop-in, framerate, and convincing weather and lighting. Its goal is to put you in a vast and beautiful world and it always feels vast and beautiful. Playing it in 4K on Xbox, it’s nearly seamless and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Related to that, Forza Horizon 4 never looks anything less than stunning. You could remove all the racing and it would at least be interesting just as a place to spend time. You could remove most of the cars from Forza Horizon 4 and it’d still be great. But Forza Horizon is so much more interested in its setting that the vehicles themselves become secondary to the experience of driving across its fantastical Scotland. That’s good fodder for a Spingsteen song, but it’s a lousy feeling in a racing game.Īn open-world racing game that I loved, Forza Horizon 4, has a lot of these same characteristics. But most of the time, Heat leaves me feeling like I’m driving circles around town, waiting for something to happen.
#NFS HEAT DAY NIGHT SCREEN UPGRADE#
Something that happened by chance as I tried to make my Rep and Money numbers go up so I could unlock more events and more cars and find something new and interesting to do beyond familiar races in a car I could easily upgrade to near-perfection. So when I have a good race in Heat, like in a lot of arcade racing games, it feels like a happy accident. The Burnout: Paradise model is familiar and opens up a lot of cool possibilities, but it also introduces a lot of potential pacing problems that can be exacerbated by progression mechanics. But that shift involved a lot of trade-offs that the genre never really reckoned with, but explain a lot about why so many arcade racers feel boring and dead on arrival. Paradise was exciting because it was a fresh and novel approach to arcade racing in its own day, as it connected the genre to the increasingly popular open-world framework. Arcade racing games have become designed to be “all filler, some killer”, a depressing side-effect of the success that Burnout: Paradise enjoyed. This is the end result of the open-world racing game becoming synonymous with the arcade racing game. Why does my high-intensity racing fantasy so often involve commuting?
Oftentimes, this means that for five minutes of racing, you spent two minutes commuting. But transitioning to nighttime means going back to a garage, toggling it to “night” when you leave, waiting for the nighttime version of the city to load, and then driving back out across the city to different event starting locations. This opens a different selection of races, usually point-to-point races rather than the multi-lap circuit design of the daytime racing events. It ends up making my time spent with it feel wasted, like a set of errands that all end up taking too long and suddenly you’ve lost a whole day.īut there’s only so far you can go with buying new gear before you have to do night racing for reputation. Because it’s a modern arcade racing game, for every minute of exciting fun, there must be a minute of aimless wandering down empty roads, or navigating different progression systems. But Heat is designed to frustrate your attempts to focus it. I’d like to keep playing a game with all those things. If you told me right now that the game ends with the chief of police being set on fire with a flaming Thin Blue Line flag as your racing crew breakdances to “Fuck tha Police,” the least believable thing there would be EA licensing an old song. It’s honestly unexpected to come across a portrayal of police this harsh in a piece of mainstream media. In one scene, as your main character and their friend get braced in a parking lot, there are vivid details like the way the cop veers from soft, almost playful interrogation to violent threat to mocking japery at your characters’ obvious terrified discomfort.
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