IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Need For Speed: Heat in About 3 Minutes!
198A detailed review of NFS Heat in 3 minutes. The goal of this review is to help you decide if it's worth buying and playing in 2021.
Bad acting, crap music and bland gameplay were just a few of the reasons I lost interest in the Need For Speed series many years ago, but after hearing some good things about NFS Heat I decided it might be worth checking it out and doing a review to help YOU decide if it’s worth buying in 2021!
Get ready for some potentially fast talking ‘cos we’ve got a lot of information to cram into a short amount of time, so sit back, buckle up and enjoy the ride!
Set in the fictional town of Palm City in the US, you play the role of a rookie street racer that’s looking to make a name for themselves, together with your crew of zany characters which in typical need for speed style feel like were plucked straight out of Fast & Furious movie, you play the key role in a short but surprisingly exciting story to fight police corruption that’s running rife in the city, and you know what, it’s actually pretty good!
It’s worth noting though that it manages to stray about as far from realistic racing and handling as it could possibly get, but that’s to be expected in an arcade racing game that’s aiming for over-the-top fun rather than any form of realism.
The handling is very drift orientated even under race conditions. It’s usually much faster to throw the car into a drift by releasing the throttle before slamming it back on again rather than sticking to the ideal racing line which is often obscured by oncoming traffic as you hurtle down steep mountain roads and navigate tight city streets.
You can play it either solo or with up to a whopping 15 other players online on occasionally laggy but mostly stable servers, the game is split into a day mode and a night mode where you earn cash for completing events during the day and reputation for completing them at night. Unlike the previous games, you don’t need an internet connection to play solo.
You need both cash and rep to progress through the story as you have to keep upgrading your car to keep up with the competition as the story progresses, and gaining rep to be able to take part in more challenging events.
The police leave you alone during the day unless you go out of your way to mess with them, but during the night even driving past them at the speed limit will almost always turn into a 5 car cop chase against the cities elite street racing task force.
The police and the AI in general are fairly competent drivers, though even on the hardest difficulty it’s usually quite easy to beat them in race events and eventually outrun the police by going cross country or jumping over a river with the help of a conveniently placed ramp.
The character animations during cutscenes look really good, and although I won’t go into any detail to avoid spoilers, the story itself was interesting and exciting enough to make me want to keep playing ‘till the end which is quite a rare accomplishment in a genre plagued by generic stories, horrible voice acting and unrelatable characters that often seen to come from a totally different planet.
There’s 4 main events to take part in which are scattered around the map including road and off-road races, drift competitions and time trials and you can customize your cars in your garage to perform better in each type of event.
Car customization is something that Need For Speed has always been good at and Heat is definitely no exception and it’s easy to spend hours in the editor creating a skin, occasionally remembering that you can actually drive the cars too! You can download, design and share car skins with the community and there’s absolutely tons of decals and stickers to work with to create pretty much any design you can imagine.
You can also upgrade the engine, suspension, brakes and other aspects of your cars to make them decent at more or less every type of event even if that means wanting to turn your Ferrari F40 into a half decent off roader.
I was also quite impressed with the line up of over 125 cars in the game including stuff like the Porsche 911 GT3 and McClaren P1, aswell as some fan favourites like the Volvo 242 and the 1976 Volkswagen Golf Gti.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by NFS Heat and ended up having a lot of fun going through the story. The problem is that once the story’s over there really isn’t a whole lot left to do. You get a little message saying “thank you for playing” and then you’re advised to just max out your level at level 50, supe up your cars to increase their performance and finish all the race events which don’t really offer much of a challenge...
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