Well a game post was needed especially after playing Need for Speed:Carbon for 3 days. Having finished career mode I thought I’d give me thoughts about NFS:C.
Now I saw the preview for this game a few months ago as someone posted about it on the PGA forums. I thought it was awesome as I do enjoy playing the Need for Speed series, ever since the good old days of the original Need for Speed. Though how does this new NFS game compare to the likes of NFS: Underground 1 and 2, and Most Wanted? Well to say I enjoyed Underground 1 and 2 more than Carbon.
Well firstly I finished Carbon fairly quickly, only 3 days. Compared to Underground and Most Wanted, after 3 days of playing I would’ve only been about 50% complete of career mode. But I think that also attributes to the easyness of Carbon as I thought the later races would become difficult, like they did in Most Wanted. Though there are a few new things in Carbon that do make it interesting, but can also make it rather annoying.
A new feature to Carbon is the use of team members. Pretty much you form a team consisiting of a maximum of 3 people, but you can only take one of them with you on a race. Each team member have various skills that can you binuses from a race and career overall. The one annoying thing is during the race. I’ve found so far in many of the races that the team members tends to be in your racing line. So say if they are slowing down the chances of you colliding, and slow you down significantly are fairly high. Another point of team members is that other racers have team members as well. meaning that instead of racing against 3 other cars, you have to race against 6 overall. Not exactly fun trying to break through a pack of 6 cars in front of you at the starting line.
Canyon Racing is a new type of racing introduced to Carbon. Simply put you are racing on a downhill canyon run. Like Initial D but in a canyon. Quite a different type of racing but it also reminds me of the last race in Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drfit. There was only one thing that I disliked about Canyon Racing and that was the camera angle. If you opted for above car view, the angle slightly shifts to the opposite side of apex corner. This makes it slightly difficult to determine if you have sterred too much or steered too little.
The soundtrack for Carbon I found rather lacking compared to Most Wanted and Underground. Music in the previous games usually give you that excited kind of feeling but in Carbon it didn’t. Hopefully that’ll change in the next NFS game.
Controls are similar to that of the previous games. But also drifting, which was absent in Most Wanted, has returned to Carbon. Though drifting has been tweaked to make it easier to drift. Now all you do is turn with the rear end of the car swinging out, and this even happens for a front wheel drive car, which is impossible without using the handbrake. I am rather disappointed as I like to be able to control drifting rather than have the end swing out automatically.
Overall NFS:Carbon isn’t as good as compared to Underground and Most Wanted. I still enjoyed playing Carbon but it just doesn’t give me the same kind of gameplay like Underground and Most Wanted. Though now that I have finished career mode I most likely won’t continue playing.
Also these are the cars that I had:
- Mazda RX-8
- Mazda RX-7
- Lotus Elise 111R
- Aston Martin DB9
- Subaru Impreza WRX STI
The best car out of these was surely the Lotus Elise as it handle extremely well around corners despite a slow acceleration, but a little bit of NOS will fix that.
For more info about NFS:Carbon and what cars are available, you can visit the following pages:
EA Games NFS:Carbon Homepage
NFSUnlimited.net
