izigame.me

I 100%ed this game so you don't have to.
TLDR: premise good, execution bad. Bonus missions and collectibles especially bad. Car customization decent.
Let's start with a good thing, I really, REALLY like the premise of dividing the action into day and night. While day is more relaxed, and has a bit of trackday/festival vibe reminiscent of Horizon series or Prostreet (I wish this was pushed even further, with a bigger storyline for the race events), the night is even more tense than before, with every race in one night increasing the XP multiplier, but also increasing the cops' interest in you, while you have limited repairs available per night - leaving you with the choice of one race per night and slower progression, or intense, high risk, high reward sessions. Too bad that once you reach level 50, there's nothing else to grind, so there is no longer any purpose in racing at night.
The driving model is... acceptable, but feels rather dull and simple, and unbalanced in many aspects, with the map not providing many use cases for the dirt tires except for a handful of events.
Story started out interesting, with it's own new faces, and the cars, which, admittedly, are as important of a character as people in this series, if not more. The intrigue is good, and the voice acting and animation is really, really good - I had tons of fun watching the cutscenes and following the story, up to like halfway into the game. However, it gets lost along the way, and the ending feels rushed and baffling.
What really infuriated me, and made me literally throw up my hands in disgust, was the reusing of Hero car from MW2005. Really, EA? Piggybacking off of a success that is FOURTEEN years old by the time of release of this game? Stripping away any personality from the final boss, and instead depending on the personality made by a completely different studio? That was insanely disappointing and bland. I wish the new NFS has something new to offer, instead of feeding us nostalgia like this one. The game lets you collect the boss cars from previous NFS games in some side missions... which also feels like milking nostalgia, and that really made me roll eyes - can't devs create a game with its own soul or do they have to always depend on older, (good), successful games to sell this one?
The aspect that enticed me the most when buying this game is customization - which there is plenty of, in terms of bodykits. What's impressive, is that you can mix and match bumpers from different manufacturers, and the developers had to model the seams for every combination - impressive feat. However, not all cars are customizable, and they are given a rating depending on how many parts are available - with many exotic or older vehicles getting a measly 1 or 2 out of 10. The livery editor is terrible - no way to group items, save groups, move them around conveniently... the Forza editor is miles ahead of this one. This kind of editor was insane back in 2006, when Carbon dropped... but nowadays it feels limiting and lackluster.
I get that it rains a lot in Florida, and that Florida is rather flat and uninteresting... but the devs made it really apparent, with the sunset and rain turning everything into this barely readable orange-brown mush, which isn't really pleasant to look at. Many locations outside the main city feel very samey, with mild hills, similar S-bends with wooden structures and rusty props.
The collectibles are as uninspired as they can get, with the same billboard and superjump stuff we've seen in Burnout, which then became a part of NFS franchise, even though it didn't fit the character of the series at all. One thing I have to give credit for is the graffitis, which give you new objects in livery editor - cool way to use art for the game and give the players some reward for exploring.
The online experience is... frustrating to say the least. You're always thrown into a server with random 7 people, who are just driving around the map and doing their own thing. If you try to start a multiplayer race, there's a big chance that those other 7 players just don't care because they are progressing at their own pace, or that they don't care about any other race except a loop around the stadium. Why not start a matchmaking with other people interested in the same track, like World did? Trying to complete 25 races for the achievement was driving me mad, because no one seemed interested in online play at all.
The music is obviously a matter of taste, but damn I miss the choice of music in the 00's NFS games. I enjoyed the menu music in this one, but the day music is Latino/pop with a bit of electronic thrown in, and the night music is just trap music - and neither are my jam. I wish the selection was more diverse in terms of genres, and that there were more tracks than 10 per section (garage/day/night).
The technical side is questionable as well - there is no anisotropic filtering, so when looking at a car at an angle, even at ultra settings in photomode, the textures are all blurry - I've read somewhere that displacement mapping makes use of anisotropic filtering tricky, so apparently devs chose to disable this altogether. What's worse is the constant pop-in of objects that need to load as you're driving... I installed this game on an overkill SSD, and I'm still getting blurry textures and low-poly objects when turning around. Sometimes the higher quality versions don't load at all, and you're driving around pixelated shrubbery despite playing on Ultra.
Summing up, this game has some interesting ideas, but every time I was starting to have fun, some issue hit me in the face, be it bugs, frustrating livery editor, uninteresting driving model, annoying collectibles or just straight up ugly graphics. The only thing worth getting this game for is the night gameplay and the car body customization.