Need for Speed: Carbon – EA’s beloved franchise takes a turn for the worse.

Need for Speed (NFS) has been one of my favorite franchises ever. I’ve beaten all the previous NFS games and played through the hundreds of races that were in NFS Underground. Unfortunately with NfS Carbon, the very solid NFS track record has finally smashed dead into a wall.

With each NFS game, EA likes to introduce new gameplay elements. The most significant one was Underground which added car customization and packages and had a very cool underground racing scene atmosphere to it all. NFS: Most Wanted added kind of the GTA- cops chase you element, threw in tons of cut scenes of other racers on the notorious blacklist and all in all while it was not as good as Underground was a nice change of pace.

NFS: Carbon goes kind of the expected route, following partly in line with Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and focuses on Canyon races, which are basically solo races against another car up and down a canyon, focusing on drifting and maintaining a good pace. While it wasn’t a bad idea, the execution just did not work. Here’s the breakdown:

Graphics aren’t bad but the world map is tiny

The improvement in the graphics engine happened mainly with NFS: Most Wanted, when the series made its shift from Xbox and PS2 to the Xbox 360. NFS: Carbon is basically that same level of detail, but at night. The world map unfortunately is tiny compared to former Need for Speed games, even though the level of detail is arguably higher. Still most racers won't notice much of the world detail since it all blurs past you. Turn off the blur in the PC version of this game and you'll notice the subtle details to buildings much more, but its not really big enough of a difference for most of us to care.

Four Turfs to Take Over

This was probably the stupidest idea on the planet. Taking a cue from GTA: San Andreas or something, they decided to divide the map up into "gang turfs" and have racing gangs in each area. So rather than racing a set of races to unlock more races as it was in the past, you take over turfs in this one and eventually challenge the gang leader.

Not a terrible idea but it partly makes the game uglier for no reason. All the cars you'll face in on area have the same color scheme to represent their gang affiliation making most of them unrecognizable and plain ugly.

Next, every 3-4 races one of your turfs will become under attack, which means you'll have to repeat an old race in order to maintain the turf. This was thrown in just to make the game artificially longer and is in my opinion a huge waste of time.

Focusing on Cooperation

One clear upgrade to the NFS: Carbon series was that the game would focus on teamwork, and it's more evident in the multiplayer modes which include one team becoming the cops and chasing down the other team, and a few other modes which I did not spend too much time on.

In single player mode this translated to having a crew, and for certain races you can have teammates that draft for you (giving you a speed boost by creating a wind tunnel ahead of you), scout (showing you shortcuts) or block (ramming other enemy cars away). The whole concept is retarded for the main reason that in street racing, everyone is trying to win, and the very concept of having someone ram other cars off the road for you is laughable.

Plus, while the teammate arguably may not have been a total loss it of itself, the major problem is that they often times get in the way during races, occasionally blocking you off by accident and even ruining your run by just getting too close to you.

Autosculpt - Now you can adjust how you're car looks exactly

Autosculpt was a way for them to give the player even more customization, but I think this was almost absurd. With autosculpt you can practically sculpt your own parts, by adjusting how wide or high certain areas of the cars front or rear bumpers look and on and on. While an interesting feature to throw in, it has very little impact on the gameplay.

Four Bosses...Yes Only 4.

The best parts of the old NFS series was facing the bosses, and there were usually up to twenty of these over the top characters, short bio videos with cool music that showcased each of them and the hot ride they had. In NFS: Carbon, they totally undid this with only 4 gang leaders and their pathetic outfits, lack of attitude, and all in all lame cars. They tried to divide the 3 gang leaders up into 3 types of cars, exotics, muscle and street, which means for some more interesting cars like the Dodge Charger, but all in all was pretty lame in of itself.

The showdown with a boss typically involves a normal circuit race followed by a canyon race, where you have to stay as close to the other car as possible while running down a canyon track. The distance you keep calculates how many points you earn for that run. Then you have to lead for the 2nd run and basically try to pull away as far as you can from the boss, and this time points get detracted from the total you earned your first run based on how far the boss is from you. If you have a positive score when you;re done you win. It's not a bad idea, but in practice turned out kind of a disappointment and is a far cry from Initial D, a drift-based racing game that you can find at arcades.

Race Types are Boring and Limited

With a lot less races than the previous games, there are also a lot fewer race types, and only the typical Circuit, Drift, Sprint, Canyon, Checkpoint and Speedtrap modes make this one, taking out Knockout and the more notable Drag races. The fewer race types make it kind of boring and there's also only a couple dozen (maybe 40 or so) races in total, a few of them repeats of each other with only slight variations.

You Can Never Outrun the Cops

It's amazing, I had a Mercedes Benz McLauren in the end and I still could not outrun the cops. That's because the game makes them virtually impossible to outrun and the only way to outrun them is to destroy them by running through obstacles. It is not like Most Wanted and in fact the whole cop mode in this game is completely different and for the worse...

The AI Cheats - A Lot

The AI continues to cheat like in previous games, but worse so in NFS: Carbon. Some races are nearly impossible because the AI for some reason will usually have one car that can drive faster than your car (even if you own the best car in the game with all the upgrades). In addition the AI has the uncanny ability to catch up near the end of the race, making for some pretty frustrating races. I usually don’t mind it when the AI cheats a little to make races exciting but in NFS: Carbon it just seems more blatant than usual.

The Storyline Sucks

NFS: Carbon follows from NFS: Most Wanted, and is about you returning to Rockport, only to find Sgt. Cross still on tail. Then you come back and you’re reminiscing about an old event (when you were first chased out of Rockport for a rigged race) and the mysterious bundle of cash that disappeared. You find out gradually that someone you know was involved on this whole scam, but basically, the entire plot vanishes after the first few CGs and never comes back. In between, as you take over Rockport, the plot barely makes mention of how this mystery unravels, and when you finally reach the end, it’s incredibly anti-climatic.

Music and Driving

The soundtrack also for some reason in this version was less memorable than the former. None of the tracks seemed like real hits for me, and most of them were techno tracks remixed, so they provided more ambiance than actual songs to really drive to.

Still, the driving at least was solid, we mustn’t forget this is the NFS series, and they do at least maintain a very good driving component. The cars all feel responsive and have certain subtle differences in driving them that correspond to their specs in real life, and all in all racing is good as it always has been.

Conclusion:

NFS: Carbon is a much shorter more incomplete game than the former and lacks a lot of the elements that made the previous games a hit. It’s missing, good music, lots of bad guys, awesome CGs, and the overall “style” that made the series stand out.

The improvements they made in NFS: Carbon while many, ultimately are in part at fault, because its clear that EA Games spent less time on the other parts of the game, including the overall length. It took me a mere 10-12 hours to beat this game.

In the end, the main focus of the new NFS: Carbon is to take advantage of Xbox Live by having you get involved in 8-way multiplayer matches, but when the game is already a bit lacking as it is, I’d have to say the sacrifice was not worth it.