Need for Speed: Heat Review (auhra)
Got this game when it was 95% off during the sale and as a Need for Speed player who only played the games during the era of Underground 2 until Carbon, this is my (biased) review for Heat so I have no prior experience or knowledge of any other modern games that come before this, which is why some of the pros and cons listed here may or may not be in previous games.
The Good:
• You can choose any car you like and replace the engine, effectively allowing you to keep the same car but improve the performance similar to how you could back in Underground 2 and Most Wanted.
• Plenty of customization options, it's not in-depth and crazy like Underground 2's but there are cars with more options than others. I do miss the wide body kits, Autosculpt of Carbon, and carbon fiber parts/bumpers/body kits.
• Car spec building and tuning. You can switch your car's build to be more suitable to having it faster on tarmac, better for drifting, off-road or just on the plain old road. You can also build your car to have better acceleration, top speed or just make it a destroyer if you hate the police that has 2 extra self-repairs while on the road.
• Good system for designing your car and even comes with community-driven car designs.
• You can change cars before entering races, which is neat.
• Graphics are visually stunning, even on low settings.
The Bad:
• The soundtrack is terrible. Maybe it's just my music taste but I don't know why the music choice in this game is horrible.
• Optimization can be quite poor on older computers. The game will run better on an SSD despite titles today working fine even on HDDs.
• You are unable to easily search for car designs, car parts, specific brands, etc. so you have to pretty much scroll all the way to find what you like and in some menus it resets you back to the beginning if you select something from it like car parts.
• During the early game, heat level 2 and above can be really punishing with the way how cops rubberband and in the late game (assuming you are playing offline/solo) it can be frustrating doing those high heat races that earn you a ton of RP and money because the police usually focus on you, especially the rhinos.
• There are no real private lobbies, like how you see in GTA V where it's only you and your friends.
• Quick Race isn't a thing anymore so you have to actually visit the races, this used to be a thing in older Need for Speed games where you just want to play arcade.
• You can't co-op most of the story missions, this seems pretty biased but it is something I'd like to do.