Need for Speed Carbon

The last few Need for Speed titles have turned out to be really solid street racing games. It started with the two Need For Speed Underground games which let you tune up any number of Import cars and tear around some random city at night. Last year the series brought the police back into the equation with Most Wanted, a game where you did your best to make trouble and become the most notorious racer in the city of Rockport. This year, EA brings us Need For Speed Carbon, which takes some of the best elements of Most Wanted, expends upon some, and downplays others.

Need For Speed Carbon’s story picks up right where Most Wanted left off. You play as the same faceless racer as before. The game starts off with a flashback, setting up the events that led to you leaving town and taking part in the events of the previous games. The story is told through the same sort of Live Action mixed with CG that Most Wanted made famous, or infamous depending on how you look at it. This time around though, there are quite a few more of those types of cutscenes. The story itself is something that feels right at home in a typical Hollywood car flick. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it serves to move the game along, and after a while, you dismiss the over-the-top nature of the story and just get into the whole world that NFS Carbon presents to you.

The majority of your time will be spent in the game’s career mode. You’ll begin by choosing a starter car, from one of three classes. There are Muscle Cars, Exotics, and Tuners. Each car class has its own properties. Muscle Cars are great for acceleration, but they don’t corner so well. Tuners might not have the greatest acceleration or top sped, but they tend to be very maneuverable. Exotics are sharp acceleration and handling, but it’s their top speed that set them apart. Once you chosen a car, the game introduce you to one of the new concepts in Carbon, that being team racing. Many races will let you take a wingman in with you. There are three classes for wingmen. Blockers can be commanded to take out an opponent either in front or behind you. Drafters will let you pull up behind them and sit in their slipstream for a while, giving you a boost of speed from the clean air. Finally, there are scouts. These guys point out shortcuts in the game world. They have bright neon trails behind their cars to make following them easier, this works well in the early going, but as the cars get faster, following a scout gets to be more difficult. Having a wingman helping you out seems like a good idea, they’re handy to have, but sometimes you’ll wish that they would just hang back instead of driving so aggressively.

Whereas in Most Wanted you were encouraged to cause as much havoc with the police as possible, Carbon almost discourages you from it. You can free-roam through the Palmont City if you like, and you might want to do this if you want to get a few of the special unlocks that can only be attained by winning street challenges. For the most part though, you can move from event to event through the game’s world map, and avoid the copy almost entirely. If the cops do come after you during a race and you get caught, you can actually retry the race without penalty. You’ll only need to deal with the police after you win the race, that’s when the chase will begin in earnest.

The game features a lot of the race types that you’ve come to expect from the series. There are lap based circuit races, point-to-point sprint races, speed based speedtrap races, and checkpoint races. Making their return from Need For Speed Underground 2 are the drift races. These will take place on either closed circuits or winding mountain roads. The object of these types of races is to score as many points as possible by sliding your car around corners. The car handling changes for these races. The cars feel very slippery, much as they did in NFS Underground 2’s drifts. It’s a shame that EA couldn’t have used the regular car handling for these races, since it works very well on its own and didn’t need a completely different handling mechanic. New to Carbon are the Canyon Duels. These are two round races where you first must try to stay with your opponent as he leads you down the long winding mountain roads. The second round has you leading your opponent, trying to put as much distance between you and them as possible. The biggest problem with these races is that they can be quite frustrating. Many of the corners in these races are on sheer cliffs, and it’s very easy to take a corner too fast or too wide and flying right off of the road, instantly ending your run. You can also lose by falling too far behind your opponent. If you fail on the second round of the canyon duel, you’ll have to go back and start over from the first round. There may be a few ways to lose, but if you manage to get ahead of your opponent in the first round and stay ahead of them for ten seconds, you’ll automatically win the duel and not have to do the second race. Canyon duels are hard at first, but there’s a real feeling of satisfaction when you complete one.

Car customization has been a part of the Need For Speed series for the last few years now. NFS Carbon doesn’t stray too far from the mold, letting you tinker with your cars looks and performance in numerous ways. This year they have added a parts molding system which they refer to as Autosculpt. In essence you can start with a base design for a particular part, like a bumper, wheel, or spoiler, and use a set of sliders to adjust the parts looks. It’s somewhat similar to the Gameface system that the Tiger Woods series has used for the last few years. There are also a host of bolt-on aftermarket parts that you can purchase for your car, so if you don’t want to take the time to fiddle with sliders to make a part look just the way you want it, you can simply buy one pre-built. NFS Carbon has a little something for everyone that way.

Aside from the career mode there are a number of single player challenge series that you can choose to take on at any time. There is also a pretty good multiplayer mode for the Xbox 360 and PC versions. The online mode will let you compete in the various single player race types, and also has a few online specific modes, like Pursuit Knockout, where the last place finisher on a particular lap turns into a cop and has to chase down the other racers. Online performance was decent, for the most part; the races didn’t seem to suffer from too much lag. As always with online play, your results may vary.

When it comes to the game’s presentation, it’s very good for the most part. The game looks the best on the Xbox 360, with lots of cool lighting, weather and reflection effects. The past-gen consoles hold their own, though the PS2 is definitely showing its age with muddy textures and jagged edges here and there. The environments that you’ll drive through look quite good, and look like they might be based on LA. If you played Most Wanted extensively, you might recognize a few objects that were recycled from that game. The audio is also very good, with great engine and collision effects. It’s here where you’ll notice the most recycling. All of the police chatter is lifted straight from Most Wanted. If you didn’t play the last game, this won’t be too big of a deal. Those of you that played Most Wanted extensively might get tired of hearing the same police chatter again. The musical presentation is, in a word, odd. There is a decent selection of licensed music here, and unlike a lot of EA games, it isn’t limited to one genre. What’s odd is that the game doesn’t make use of it very often; instead it plays its own dramatic style music whenever it can. On the whole though, the audio is good, but a bit too much recycling and over-used interactive music hurts it a bit.

Need For Speed Carbon is a solid racing game. It might have a few rough edges and frustrating spots, but overall it’s a fun game. With a nice single player career mode and a good multiplayer mode on the Xbox 360 and PC, NFS Carbon has enough to keep you going for a long time.