Need for Speed Carbon (Value Games) previews

As a long time fan of the Need for Speed franchise, I was fully expecting a quality game and it delivers exactly that.

The title is well polished with an enjoyable, quick-fire single player campaign. It seems like more of the same, but several new features improves upon the old system. The option to choose different classes of vehicles to play with (Exotic, Muscle and Tuner) makes for a new approach to your racing style and will definately satisfy the old school crowd. The addition of turf battles and boss canyon races adds more edge of your seat to the game. What I particularly love about it is how a quick, ten minute gaming session is possible and how often those lead to hours of burning and shredding rubber around the city. The multiplayer options will add even more longevity to the game.

The cut-scenes are a bit more polished than in NFS:Black and they have lost Brooke Burke, but all in all this is a well thought out and enjoyable game for anyone that loves to mindlessly thrash a virtual car around.

NFS: Carbon offers better graphics (but still no widescreen support!), some good music and it's typical “fast and furious” gameplay. However, this time around the police chases are not important (more of an annoyance if you pick up the cops while racing you have to lose them before being able to go “home” and add your new unlocked items to your car, and get nothing but “reward cards” for your trouble)

In Most Wanted you moved forward by gaining respect from causing havoc and losing the cops in mass chases, this one you win races and claim territory. Blocks of territory unlocks new cars and you move forward until you get to the final guy. This took me about 7 hours on-and-off, but the game's only 50% complete – there's quite a few “challenges” to do as well

One thing I don't like is that the cars are in “tiers”, so for example the Mazda RX8 is a teir 1 car and the Supra or EVO are tier 3. You're forced to upgrade to a higher tier because there's no way you can win later races with a lower teir, this goes against the whole “tuning” scene to me – if I can't max out my fave car to play against the end boss I feel detached a little, what if I don't like the teir 3 cars? – but a minor niggle

Customisation is great but is it me or have they taken away the ability to put decals down the door?! Anyway overall it's still a good NFS title but part of me wants to go re-play Most Wanted, it just felt more… fun

This game starts well and runs okay for a bit, however the tracks are repetiative (more or less the same as undergound 1) with no new features, think most wanted at night. The car unlocks are much less spectacular then i thought they would be , customisation options are nice. My main sticking point is the way the ai acts, at the start its a little to easy but your car is at least matched to what the ai is using, buy about 60% though the game the ai ratchets up the difficulty majorly, to the point my fully upgraded rx7 was being overtaken by golf gti's (with my rx in top gear and nos on). Which reminded me alot of juiced, which also sucked. I have said it before and i will say it again the series peaked with NSU2 (a bit easy at times) but otherwise the best so far the most options and the best combo of races. On a final note will ea please make “freeform” “freeform” it would be nice to be able to progress without doing all races, eg i prefer drift so im going to do mostly/all drift races. This is the last game in the nsu/Mw series im going to buy unless EA does something new and pulls its finger out and comes up with something good.