NFS: Rivals

[novicius]

Since my cousins' lil' gaming crew picked this arcadey title up, I also digitally downloaded this title + DLC for $16.50. #ouch

::

Hmm. How much of this game rips off the original Forza Horizon? 60%? 75%?

Short of missing the Forza Festival, this game feels very "Horizon + Cops & Weapons" to me initially. Maybe it'd be different if I had opted to play as a Copper first? Regardless, there's a big world map with challenges of all sorts on it (like in Horizon), the roads have wide gutters but definite barriers, and it all has a similar Horizon scale to it.

(I make the distinction between Forza Horizon and Test Drive: Unlimited here because of the nature of the challenges themselves. There are things like racing a train, crazy jumps, etc.)

Now, it's not a bad racing game so far; for a 1st wave "next console gen" title the graphics are definitely nice (1080p/30fps on both consoles), very nice environmental effects, the car models look good and interestingly enough they look dirty/gritty in your Garage vs supa-shiny. The "Hot Pursuit + Most Wanted" elements are fun in a Mario Kart kinda way: you can equip various weapons onto your cars as well as select simple paint and pre-made graphic choices. It's all quick 'n' dirty and gets you back out on the road in a lot less time than Forza.

Handling-wise, it's... arcadey. Simplified. More PGR than Ridge Racer but not PGR2 levels of sweetness. All of the cars I've driven so far handle fairly similarly: drive hard into a corner, let off and/or brake hard and it's only when you mash the gas will the car magically hook up and tighten your line. Kinda counter-intuitive? Or rewards courageous corner-blowin-in-the-real-world viddy gamin'? #shrug

So... not worth $60 (to me). Worth $16.50? Yeah, I think so.

[GreatScawt]

I played the demo of this forever ago and just remember it being god awful

[novicius]

What can I say? My expectations were low.

[Yw-slayer]

Hmm. How much of this game rips off the original Forza Horizon? 60%? 75%?

Short of missing the Forza Festival, this game feels very "Horizon + Cops & Weapons" to me initially. Maybe it'd be different if I had opted to play as a Copper first? Regardless, there's a big world map with challenges of all sorts on it (like in Horizon), the roads have wide gutters but definite barriers, and it all has a similar Horizon scale to it.

This is unfair in the extreme.

The valid question is how much the Forza Horizon team ripped off the NFS games going all the way back to NFS:Most Wanted (2005): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_fo..._video_game%29

Or if you want to be charitable, NFS: Hot Pursuit (2010), which was developed by Criterion Games, the people who did the original Burnout games.

Surely it's more like Horizon having ripped off maybe 90% of the stuff from those games but put some spurious "Horizon Festival" excuse on top of that?

[novicius]

This I Learned: NFS: Most Wanted (2005) came out a year before Test Drive: Unlimited (2006)! I always thought it was the other way around.

In that light then you're right, YDub: Rivals is just following the Most Wanted family formula.

I played the demo of this forever ago and just remember it being god awful

YW, this is the typical attitude I expected to see towards this game so please do not make out like I'm needlessly bashing some racing game champ -- it ain't. Metacritic shows a user score of 5.9/10 as well.

::

That said, I played some more after pub trivia last night. It's decent fun once you accept (ignore?) the arcadey handling model.

I've been using the DLC-provided 2015 Ford Mustang GT to poach some of my friends' times on various challenges; unfortunately, cars aren't clearly classed against each other so I have a few non-car folks on my Friends List that would have difficulty comprehending the achievement of using a Mustang to take out their Lamborghini times.

[Yw-slayer]

No, it's fair enough to say that it's a crap (or otherwise) game. That's subjective and in any case I've not played it, so I have no issue with that part. I was just pointing out that it was a bit unfair to claim that NFS was now ripping Forza when it was clearly the other way around.

NFS:Hot Pursuit and MW(2005) were good fun, but I'll be the first to admit that there have been some real stinkers in the NFS "open world" series. The lowlight was NFS:Undercover (2008), which I bought partly because Maggie Q starred in the cutscenes but partly because I had had so much fun with NFS:Most Wanted (2005). Sadly, I had no idea that:

1. It used exactly the same map as Most Wanted, which was a 3+ year old game that I had played to death already.

2. It looked worse on the PS3 than Undercover (again, a 3+ year old game) did on my PC.

3. More damningly, on the PS3 (a CONSOLE FFS!!!), it would constantly stutter and drop frames to the extent that it was unplayable, whereas Undercover had run quite well on a c.2005 Core 2 Duo E6600.

I have never felt so ripped off by a game, and I actually paid full price for the bloody thing (the closest I've ever come since is Beyond Earth, which was also very bad given the hype and hopes). I was unsurprised and actually sort of pleased that Black Box got shut down a few years later, given the rubbish that they had produced.

[novicius]

I think Ghost Games UK (the dev who made the game) knows what they want -- there are more than 70 names that worked on the Burnout series that built this one.

Too bad they all got shitcanned.

The driving engine is tactile and the cars do have weight; it's just highly simplified as well as being homogenized across all of the cars as far as I can tell.

[Yw-slayer]

Yeah, it's a bit of a pity as the Burnout series was good fun.

[GreatScawt]

Burnout Paradise was amazing. Then Criterion made NFS: Hot Pursuit and NFS: Most Wanted, both of which are tremendous and are basically the same thing.

[thesameguy]

I like both of those as well. I also liked the Underground games, which might be sad. The stuff that's come out since has been largely disappointing. Frankly, I'd take GTAV.