Need for Speed: Carbon review

A while back we took a look at NFS: Carbon on Xbox, PC and Xbox 360, here Craig fills us in on his experience with the PlayStation 2 version.

Need for Speed: Carbon isn’t exactly the same as last year’s NFS. This time around we’ve got the brand spanking new crews to play with, whereby every race you go into you have a crew member fighting your side too. As the game wears on, you get to choose who you want to hire and fire, and what kind of crew member you want in each race. Adding even more to the tuning and customisation options this year is the Autosculpt feature, which allows you to set sizes for each individual parts on your car. There’s also the new winning turf idea (more on that later), and that’s about your lot.

The problem is it’s not the things that have been added to the series that don’t work: it’s the things that have never left. Old annoyances have returned: cars that feel like you’re riding on a rather heavy sleigh instead of a finely tuned supercar and coppers that can keep up with your car not matter how fast you can go are just two of the gripes that have returned from last year. It’s not just that though, there’s also the fact to consider that the racing mechanics weren’t that amazing last time around and this time around nothing has changed. You’d think that this being a racing game EA would have focused on improving the actual racing, but instead it feels like it has stuck on lots of other options to hide the fact that it has not touched it.

Same Again?

Maybe EA has just decided to go on the old saying of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, because on the whole the racing isn’t broken. This time around there’s the option to choose what kind of car class you can race in: muscle, tuner, and exotic. Being able to pick what car class you want from the beginning of the game does add some longevity to NFS:C, and it means you’re not stuck with a low powered Fiesta for your first car. Each class really does handle differently too, with the muscle series being easily the least enjoyable experience. Imagine buttering the underside of a ship and giving it a steering wheel, and your almost there.

For the majority of the time NFS:C is a pleasant arcade racer. You can see that EA has gone for the OTT driving style as always for the more recent NFS games, but if you’re new you may struggle to accommodate the handling. Underground fans will be power sliding your car around corners in no time. A word of warning however: don’t try to drive slow when you’re cruising about looking for a race, because your car bizarrely wheel spins forever under 30 mph. It’s as if the driver of the car is just putting his foot to the floor then taking it off ever five seconds.

Born Free

The free roaming aspect makes a return to the series again, which is becoming more and more of a requirement for almost every racer out there. Similar to last time, there isn’t really a purpose for it. Everything on your map you can fast track to anyway, so in theory you can spend the whole game without driving a single extra mile. Throw in the fact that sometimes the police decide to chase you and smash your car to bits, a lot of the time the free roaming side just becomes more annoying than anything else.

This time around progression isn’t made from winning races, it’s from winning turf. Yes, the owning-turf gimmick has now surfaced in racing games too. And it doesn’t really work. To win turf, you have to win races. Seeing as though you’ve got to win races anyway, the turf aspect of it just seems throwaway. All it means is that you can go to face the “boss” when you own all of the turf of the area to completely take over the area and win respect. Saint’s Row may have pulled it off, but sticking this feature into a racing game really doesn’t translate.

Essentially, Need for Speed: Carbon is Need for Speed: Most Wanted in the dark, but with a more expensive price tag. None of the new gimmicks outlined here add much to the game to warrant a purchase, so if you’re looking for a Need for Speed game with your Christmas vouchers, go get Most Wanted which is now available at a bargain price.