Need for Speed Carbon
EA adds canyon drift racing to the free-roaming formula, but is it enough?
Published: November 28, 2006
If nothing else, you have to hand it to EA for at least having their pulse on mass-market trends. Okay, maybe just stuff Hollywood hopes develops into a mass-market trend. The Need for Speed franchise has been going strong for years now, but up until a little game called Need for Speed Underground, it was simply an excuse to take licensed cars around a bunch of circuit races. That was good, but
Underground fully embraced the idea -- however cliché -- of an entire racing community, an underground one (as if the title didn't make that obvious enough) that strode out into the night to challenge other street racers obsessed with tuning the hell out of their rides. EA played around with the idea of drift racing, the art of pitching a car's weight so hard that you were in fact doing the opposite of everything traditional racing enforced; forcing tires to lose their grip and essentially powersliding around corners. Though it may not have been a true replication of the sport, it was a lot of fun, and along with the whole idea of freely roaming a full city, pushed the franchise in a new direction.
The series has continued on in that direction, though it hasn't really grown terribly since the first Underground. The sequel was more or less the same thing but more polished and the more recent Most Wanted reintroduced the idea of cops and the pursuit to the party. Need for Speed Carbon, then, is just an extension of those leaps from game to game. It doesn't radically shift things, and really only introduces one thing (the titular Carbon Canyon and its nearby neighbors, which inject drift battles through windy mountain roads), but it is still fun.
The question will doubtlessly come up: does it feel next-gen? With the exception of happily embracing Sony's PlayStation Network, not especially. The visuals (which I'll get to in a bit) are clean and obviously upgraded, but it does still feel at its core like a hi-def version of the games we've been playing for the past three iterations, no doubt a byproduct of the fact that the game is, despite having a next-gen version, still targeted at current-gen. It's possible we won't see a truly next-gen version of the game until the PS2 and Xbox are completely phased out of the development cycle (which, given EA's annual release schedule, will probably happen with the next game).
So what, then, justifies the $60 price tag? Beyond PSN integration, it's mainly just the fun of tearing around a new city. In much the same way Burnout and Tony Hawk have managed to tweak things with each new version, Carbon simply adds something that feels like it could have been there all along. You'll still spend most of your time in a neon-lit metropolis, free roaming (or quick hopping) to a handful of basic race types with some canyon variations (Circuits are traditional lap-based tracks, Sprints are point-to-point battles, Speed Traps record your speed going through gates and use the combined totals to determine the winner rather than where you place, Time Trials give you a set amount of time to make it to the next gate and Drift races balance a classic risk/reward of getting a powersliding car as close to a wall without hitting it as possible).
Underground fully embraced the idea -- however cliché -- of an entire racing community, an underground one (as if the title didn't make that obvious enough) that strode out into the night to challenge other street racers obsessed with tuning the hell out of their rides. EA played around with the idea of drift racing, the art of pitching a car's weight so hard that you were in fact doing the opposite of everything traditional racing enforced; forcing tires to lose their grip and essentially powersliding around corners. Though it may not have been a true replication of the sport, it was a lot of fun, and along with the whole idea of freely roaming a full city, pushed the franchise in a new direction.
The series has continued on in that direction, though it hasn't really grown terribly since the first Underground. The sequel was more or less the same thing but more polished and the more recent Most Wanted reintroduced the idea of cops and the pursuit to the party. Need for Speed Carbon, then, is just an extension of those leaps from game to game. It doesn't radically shift things, and really only introduces one thing (the titular Carbon Canyon and its nearby neighbors, which inject drift battles through windy mountain roads), but it is still fun.
The question will doubtlessly come up: does it feel next-gen? With the exception of happily embracing Sony's PlayStation Network, not especially. The visuals (which I'll get to in a bit) are clean and obviously upgraded, but it does still feel at its core like a hi-def version of the games we've been playing for the past three iterations, no doubt a byproduct of the fact that the game is, despite having a next-gen version, still targeted at current-gen. It's possible we won't see a truly next-gen version of the game until the PS2 and Xbox are completely phased out of the development cycle (which, given EA's annual release schedule, will probably happen with the next game).
So what, then, justifies the $60 price tag? Beyond PSN integration, it's mainly just the fun of tearing around a new city. In much the same way Burnout and Tony Hawk have managed to tweak things with each new version, Carbon simply adds something that feels like it could have been there all along. You'll still spend most of your time in a neon-lit metropolis, free roaming (or quick hopping) to a handful of basic race types with some canyon variations (Circuits are traditional lap-based tracks, Sprints are point-to-point battles, Speed Traps record your speed going through gates and use the combined totals to determine the winner rather than where you place, Time Trials give you a set amount of time to make it to the next gate and Drift races balance a classic risk/reward of getting a powersliding car as close to a wall without hitting it as possible).
