Forum Overview :: Reviews :: I didn't, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

[quote name="Gutsby"]BIG WARNING: YOU NEED AN AWSOM COMPUTER TO RUN THIS GAME AT 60FPS WITHOUT WEIRD PHYSICS PROBLEMS. I HAVE THAT AWSOM COMPUTER. IF YOU DONT IT WILL BE LIMITED TO THIRTY. ITS THIRTY ON ALL THE CONSOLES. I'm going through a racing-game revival - the last few months I've played Driver: SF, Shift 2, and NFS: Rivals. The last racing game I played before these games was Flatout: Ultimate Carnage. I have no idea what Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit was about, or where it fits into the NFS-brand - I just got Rivals because it was on sale on Origin. It's a game of cops and robbers. If you're a robber, you leave your garage, drive into the world, and try to stay uncaught while building your cash and combo. Return to your garage to cash in your points - get caught and lose them all. As a cop, you hunt people down - the risk/reward element is downplayed, and you can just kinda play the game and earn cop upgrades. Being a robber is more exciting. It all works out as an open world racing game without city streets, just long winding picturesque roads with lots of drifting opportunities. You'll drive through an enormous stretch of desert, through a tunnel, and emerge in a rugged mountaintop scenario with snow - I like this deliciously abstract computer game way of doing things, but YMMV. It has a "combat" system - you can equip two "skills" in your car (like Shockwave, which shunts people around you off the road, or EMP, which locks onto people ahead of you and shuts down their engine if the lock completes. The lock on can be hard-countered by using a skill.) - but the AI only seem to start using them aggressively when you do, so you can sort of choose what kind of gameplay you want. Most of all, this is a game that does a lot with the racing game aesthetic - the scenery looks truly amazing, and things like a full daylight cycle and weather constantly modifies how you move through the huge world and how it looks. I really like how they model driving - it's incredibly arcadey, but it feels unified with their design of the world. Doing big drifts isn't hard, doing a perfect drift is. Driving well is easier when the road is wide, harder when it is narrow. I'm not a purist in any way when it comes to handling, I'm more about "feel", and I love abstract shit like Ridge Racer. I also liked Flatout, Outrun, Shift 2, Forza 2, Driver, WipeOut, and Burnout. I've never liked a Codemasters driving game. I don't really know how to talk about the bits and bobs of this, but driving is important in a driving game, so that's where I'm at. I think you might have problems with the way things unlock: you start with a couple of cars and can pursue a "speedlist" from a list of three. These speedlists are essentially just themed (racing, pursuit, driving precision) packets of achievements. So you'll get a speedlist telling you to gold a race, earn 70 000 points in a session, and drift for 200 meters. When you complete it, you unlock a bunch of stuff, including a new car. Pick a new speedlist, unlock a new car, unlock more stuff. It's very simple, but I kinda like how easy it is to sit down, play for 20 minutes, and just unlock a car. The "always online" aspect actually works for me - I enjoy the ambience of other people driving around in the world, with everyone just doing their own thing unless they choose to join up for a proper multiplayer event. If you're driving around in the same area as others, you'll add 1 to your multiplayer for every other player present in the area - this leads to people sort of naturally gelling together into huge chases now and then. I'm not too deep into the game, but the AI acts really human. Pileups and wrecks happen. I'm sure there's some amount of rubberbanding (a racing game without rubberbanding is the dumbest, smallest idea anyone has ever had) but it hasn't been egregious so far. Maybe you'll like it! [/quote]