The Day vs Night dynamic adds a new wrinkle to just completing race after race. The good news is Heat lets us toggle it back to brake-to-drift, which allows a driver to stay mashed on the gas and just quickly pump the brake to get sideways. You play Need For Speed games to race, not to tail police officers without raising suspicion. Palm City can be Miami, it can be Southern California. Like in Forza Horizon, even stone walls crumble and trees splinter if you careen off course. They are a fair bit tougher, though; certainly until you can secure the best upgrades.
Night is absolutely the superior visual experience, especially when it rains. Palm City is a varied open-world racing environment, though, again, it does seem to lack character. The answer, at least for this game, seems to be a competent racer, nothing more, nothing less. But even better than that is exhaust tuning, which allows fine tuning of the already excellent exhaust notes available. The city itself is the big highlight here — the surrounding countryside is a little unmemorable — but there are a few other cool spots, including a mini Cape Canaveral-style space centre, a fun abandoned racing oval, and a big container yard begging for a shred session. At night, ramp up the intensity in illicit street races that build your reputation, getting you access to bigger races and better parts. There is a lack of polish — close draw distances and pop-in, cars visibly spawning and bouncing at the start line, weird audio issues, the list goes on.
It all sounds good on paper. Fewer encounters with momentum-killers helped to keep my pace high and my pulse higher. Need for Speed Heat also introduces drift racing toward the end of its series of introductory missions, which still carried me deep into the levels of my legitimate and underworld racing career. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. It feels more intuitive to me, like a quick dip of the clutch to spike the revs. Heat looks a bit plainer in daylight — overall, the environment looks better whipping by at 150 miles an hour than under intense scrutiny — but the racing is decent. The racing is also more exciting, with traffic to avoid and more aggressive cops to deal with.
Drifting feels a bit slower in Heat than Payback but you have more control of car angle, which has made the drift events quite enjoyable. But even better than that is exhaust tuning, which allows fine tuning of the already excellent exhaust notes available. Drifting feels a bit slower in Heat than Payback but you have more control of car angle, which has made the drift events quite enjoyable. The engine upgrades are pretty standard, but the handling is where the upgrading shines. In addition, please read our , which has also been updated and became effective May 23rd, 2018.
A Race drivetrain increases grip and allows for better cornering, focusing on throttle and brake control which will make your car corner faster and better at Extreme levels of race tuning. The core reason why Need For Speed Heat seems to work so well is because it gets back to the features that made the series so enjoyable to begin with, and puts them at the forefront: fast cars, street racing, customisation, earning respect and outrunning the cops. I dominated every race by nearly two seconds from there on. As for performance, players can improve various aspects of their vehicle under the hood, with higher tiers of upgrades unlocking as you progress. This is easily the most impressive Need for Speed game in many years. No matter what else the game does well, all these issues make the whole thing feel rushed and barely finished. Why are we seeing a new one, now? Daytime Palm City is defined by regular, sanctioned street racing on marked courses for cash payouts, while night racing is all about illegal, underground racing and running from the fuzz to build up rep points.
Natürlich darf das Tuning bei Need for Speed auch nicht zu kurz kommen. Heat looks a bit plainer in daylight — overall, the environment looks better whipping by at 150 miles an hour than under intense scrutiny — but the racing is decent. Huge crashes will barely cause a dent, while a minor collision can knock a chunk off your health. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audience is coming from. Also, the Busted Bar timer that ticks down to an automatic loss is absolute baloney. And although the cars look best in the rain like the rest of the world itself , great little touches like animated raindrops trickling down side panels are a bit undermined by the fact nobody animated the windscreen wipers. Thankfully, after experiencing the thrills that Palm City has to offer, Heat is the best entry of the current console generation.
The handling and physics are drift heavy, making Need For Speed Heat feel very arcadey and remenscient of older games in the series. Need for Speed Heat launched Nov. Some vehicles are better suited than others, of course. To be fair, Palm City must be some form of utopian society if the big menace plaguing the streets is some idiots with too much nitrous, living their lives a quarter mile at a time. The good news is Heat lets us toggle it back to brake-to-drift, which allows a driver to stay mashed on the gas and just quickly pump the brake to get sideways. Players are given the choice of racing in a solo or multiplayer world.
If you want to grow as a racer, look elsewhere. This might be just how my playthrough progressed, but completing these stories unlocked parts I already had, sometimes even a tier below my current level, making them feel pointless as a whole. Day racing, on the other hand, feels tame and empty as a result. Two required emergency-braking and physics-defying u-turns to lose them. Brake Bias can also be tuned for entering drifts by transferring weight to the front wheels, as well as using the handbrake for the more tight corner and hairpin drifts. Three cops, you may as well give up. If you want to go fast and win, Heat has you covered.