Need For Speed Carbon: Own The City review

When EA takes to a franchise, EA really does take to a franchise. The number of Need For Speed games have been emerging at regular intervals since the 3DO release way back when and have had a few make-overs through the years but the broad concept is the same: get fast cars and race them. The last release, Most Wanted, put emphasis on escaping the police, but that has been almost entirely removed. Oddly, the main thrust of this game is the storyline. Even odder, the storyline is a whodunit: where your character awakes after a serious crash to find that it has killed his older brother. In order to find out who the killer is you race against rival gangs to take over the city. There does seem to be a major jump of logic in that sentence, but as the game doesn't really explain it don't expect this review to, either. In fact the game explains little with regards to the story, cut-scenes are presented artistically and occasionally this makes them hard to follow, but outside of cut-scenes it is never explained why you are doing a three-lap race, you just do it. If the story is meant to push you to progress, it doesn't. And just wait until you get to the end: it really is the sort of ending that makes you wonder why you bothered. Or for that matter, why they bothered.The free roaming city is where all the races take place. One the one hand it makes sense: street racing takes place in cities and it fits with the aim of taking it over. On the other hand though it doesn't work that well with little variety (not aided by perpetual night time) between tracks. Carbon also suffers from the same problem all other city-based racing games suffer from; if you create a realistic, believable city it won't be fun to race around and if you create a fun city to race around it isn't in any way believable. For the most part it goes for the latter, with winding roads popping up in places where you wouldn't expect them. Even with the city feeling a little odd, it still doesn't ever feel like a carefully designed track, it feels quick and lazy (even if it did take more work to create).There is a vague feeling that much of the game has been tainted by bad decisions. Car handling is one, with what feels to be a conscious decision not to have truly arcade handling, such as Ridge Racer or Outrun 2, but also not to get anywhere near realistic handling. The result is some kind of floaty in-between handling that somehow makes things both easier and harder at the same time. Easier as you don't really have to think, just sort of corner and try to drift and you'll probably get around the corner. Harder because it is hard to predict which corners your car can manage, even after spending hours with the game. There just isn't enough feedback from the car to judge how to improve next time.Speaking of cars, there is an odd little quirk there too. The option to upgrade a car is always a good idea, but providing so many means that with more than two thirds of the game complete Gamestyle never felt the need to buy a new car (we did, just to make sure that the other cars were just as floaty, but never because we needed to). Just put a turbo in, buy some more nitrous and you wont feel too lacking in power compared to rivals. Of course, it's probably due to the fact the game is unbelievably easy, but deciding you need to buy one, saving up and finally blowing all that hard-earned money in one go is one of the pleasures of games like this. Each area of the city to be conquered requires several races to be completed before its possible to challenge the area leader. As well as lap and point-to-point races, there are a few different ones but they don't really work. Escape and Crew Takedown are both free-roaming, but as it's pretty hard to keep track of cars with so many junctions around there is no way of getting too far away from the CPU cars, they simply teleport and appear next to you. The overly-random nature makes both of them tempting to avoid in the race selections. That said, they are generally shorter than the lap races, some of which go on for far too long.There is one addition to the racing: the wingman system. Most races (although not all, clearly they don't like to be your wingman any time, just when mutually convenient) involve two of your crew members racing with you. Gauges fill on the left and when full unlock options such as them diving in front of you to give you a speed boost by drafting (which doesn't happen any other time, oddly), laying down spike traps, ramming opponents and suchlike. While it's a bit of an overstatement to call them tactical options, they do add a little something to the mix. Again, oddly, there doesn't seem to be much reason to switch and unlock new crew members as the initial combination works well and despite more impressive stats the ones available later don't feel that much of an improvement. (Oh, and if your wingmen are capable of hurtling past you at the touch of a button, why don't they just win the races themselves?)The other big draw for the title is online play, but sadly it's not worth getting excited about. Firstly, the problem that every single online racer is using the Murcielago which means unless you've completed the game you're not going to see a fair race. It's unlikely they earned it as they didnt seem very capable, even the little souped-up Lancer Gamestyle took to races managed to get well in to the lead before the fellow racer quit, leaving Gamestyle with nothing to show for their achievement. The problem of lag is more pressing and every race suffered from it to a certain extent. Cars appear and disappear and when combined with the poor frame-rate of the game it soon seems more like a mime artist doing an impression of a race rather than fast, flowing online action.Poor frame-rate? Yeah, we forgot that bit. Despite the fact it looks far from impressive, with mostly murky brown buildings making up the city (aside from occasional boats or planes) and cars being extremely average to look at, the game jitters constantly and completely fails at being either smooth or fast. The city isn't impressively sized to make up for it either; you'll soon learn to expect certain land-marks being included in almost every race. It's all very unimpressive.The problem with all this is that it's hard to put a finger on anything so spectacularly wrong to mark it down for. It's predictably well presented outside the game, it's easy enough to pick up and get on with, if you can tolerate relatively vast loading breaks. The story might be terrible, but somehow it is still better than nothing and the wingman system does work, even if it is a bit odd. None of it is that bad. On the flip side, there is no reason to recommend NFS: Carbon either. Races are largely dull, cars aren't particularly interesting and online play is a complete non-event. In short, don't bother buying it but if you get it as a gift (and they've lost the receipt) you might still get some entertainment out of it.