The driving genre is a wild card as both arcade and simulators dominate this genre. At any given time an arcade racer and sweep the industry away or a top, not simulator can take over later in the year. The racing genre is one of the most competitive out there.
Wreckfest
Fun. That’s this year’s main word for the racing genre. Wreckfest came out on top by not only delivering the goods that racing fans want such as superb visuals, great physics, and well-made cars, but the game doesn’t’ take itself seriously and is pure fun. Smash, crash, and blast your way through opponents on and off the track. Can’t get more fun than that in this genre.
This is one award you do not want. Many games can be disappointing due to development hell, or just a lack of inspiration. Many AAA titles and beloved franchises have fallen to disappointing depths for many a reason. While many people may agree there were other disappointing games this year, to me they weren’t depression worthy of how utterly horrid they were.
Out of all the sickeningly disappointing games this year, this one takes the cake. The game plays well, looks amazing, and is everything we wanted in the sequel, but EA decided to lock away new characters and introduce criminal worthy progression systems to unlock these characters with hours of unnecessary grinding. While these have been patched out, releasing a game thinking this is OK at all is a shame and not what gaming is about.
Need for Speed has had a great comeback over the last few years, and Most Wanted seems to have topped it. Being a remake of 2005’s excellent Most Wanted, this version is a whole new beast. The streamlined menus, AutoLog, the massive amount of real-world cars, and the huge world to drive in are something to get excited about.
My favorite feature has to be the new navigation menu. Being able to select races, customize your car, and jump to various cards with just the D-pad is great. There’s not even a need for a map. Select the race you want, and it will put the GPS line on your mini-map. Want to drive a different car? 3 D-pad clicks, and you’re there. This just seems nearly revolutionary for the racing genre, as they have been plagued with nasty menus for years. Outside of the menu are excellent racing moments and various types of races to do.
Sprints, circuits, fastest speed, and losing the cops the fastest are just a few types of races in Most Wanted. The whole goal is to find all the jump areas where cars are hidden throughout the entire world. Win first in each race for each car, and you will win part upgrades to make your car faster and better to drive. Some parts are better for certain areas, like offroad, but will slow you down on the asphalt. There are also various parts to help the cops, like re-inflating tires if you hit a spike strip or a stronger chassis for ramming through roadblocks. Like previous Need for Speed games (and any criterion racer), you can take down vehicles for more points to work your way to the number one most wanted.
A fun feature here (and it threw me for a loop) was having to take down a most wanted car to win their car. Sure, you can beat them in a race, but what about taking them down? It adds a greater challenge, but if you miss them, you can always summon the car back via the navigation menu. It’s not hard to work your way up to the top if you try to get first in every race. Even after you beat the most wanted vehicle, you can earn parts and find every hidden vehicle in the city.
If that’s not enough, try the AutoLog recommended objectives or try to find and hit every billboard in the game. There’s a lot to do in this game, and even though it can feel repetitive after a while, there’s just a great sense of accomplishment from getting first in every race. Let’s talk about graphics. Most Wanted is one of the best-looking games on the Vita. The sense of speed is great, and the controls are amazing. It doesn’t look like the game took much of a hit from being downgraded graphically, but it was hand-tailored to the system. The game even sounds great, and I spent hours just racing around, completing races without ever getting bored. Is there anything bad about Most Wanted? Mainly how repetitive the races can get overall, but the variety of cars keeps this played down a bit. Crashing every 5 seconds can get annoying, but that’s expected. Most Wanted is a must-have racer for any system you can own it on.
What makes a good driving game? The best visuals, physics, modes, and fun cars to drive. It is all like a synchronized dance and all has to flow together.
Criterion are geniuses for a reason. The masterminds behind the Burnout franchise, EA game them the keys to Need for Speed and have made two great games already. Most Wanted is just slick, fast, and streamlined. The game is so much fun that you will never feel bored. There are a lot of fun modes and Autolog can’t be topped. The game also looks fantastic on Vita and PC. Transformed came in a close second, but just doesn’t feel as slick as Most Wanted.
Need for Speed has taken many different directions, but the mid- to late-2000s were the worst for the series. ProStreet is probably the worst NFS I have played, and I can’t really recommend this to even hardcore fans. The game has good customization options and varied event types, but after a couple dozen races, you will be bored.
Races consist of earning a certain amount of points to “dominate the day.” These events range from drifts, drags, grips, time attacks, and sector shootouts. Sector Shootout is where you have a track divided into sections, and you must get the fastest times in those sections to win. Grip races are straight-up races, and the rest is history. Out of these events, the drags are the best because you need to heat up your tires before racing. You can only win by getting perfect shifts, but after you get NOS upgrades, the drags become really easy. There are 1/4 mile and 1/2 mile drags, but I would have liked to see 3/4 and 1 mile drags as well. All the other races are pretty boring, and drifting in the game feels like dragging an 18-wheeler through the dirt. No matter what car you use, drifting never feels right and is a huge pain to pull off.
The game was one of the first NFS games that used real-time damage, which is supposed to affect the way the car drives but really doesn’t. You can get light and heavy damage, but I never really noticed much of a hit in performance. If you damage your car, you have to repair it before the next race, but you can use cash or repair markers that you earn. My biggest issue with these “Race Days” is that if you quit in the middle, you have to restart the whole thing. This drove me nuts because I couldn’t go upgrade my car and come back.
Upgrading your cars is pretty fun because there are a lot of options for both performance and cosmetics. You can fine-tune your car as well, but there is a quick upgrade option for impatient people. You can only have certain cars for certain event types, but you can only save customizations as blueprints. This allows you to have multiple looks and load-outs for your cars. I found that cash is given very slowly and parts are very expensive, so you won’t be upgrading very often, which is a huge bummer.
Lastly, the game is just monotonous. After about a couple dozen races, you will feel fed up with the same tired races over and over again. The physics feel too weighty, and most cars feel the same no matter how you upgrade them. The whole game is really unbalanced and poorly designed. The game doesn’t even officially support the Game for Windows controller and just shows keyboard buttons instead. I just gave up about halfway through because some races were always easy, no matter who you were, and some were extremely difficult, no matter how good you were. The visuals are decent, but not anything to write home about. The announcer is just extremely annoying to listen to with his stoner one-liners, and he just blabbers on about nonsense.
Overall, ProStreet wasn’t very good when it came out and isn’t 5 years later. There were, and still are, better racing games out there. I can’t really recommend this game unless you like monotony and repetitive nonsense. ProStreet is half-broken and highly unbalanced. As it stands, this is probably the worst NFS out there right now.
Need for Speed has taken many different directions in the last decade, but The Run tries to go back to its roots while trying something new. Sure, you’re being chased by cops, doing illegal stuff in a car, having great graphics, and having a super-fast sense of speed. It sounds like an NFS game, right? Well, in a sense, it is, but it won’t change haters’ minds or make hardcore fans happy. This isn’t the true return like Hot Pursuit was, but it does convey a nice idea. You play a guy named Jack Rourke who owes a mob a lot of money. You hear about a race from San Francisco to New York, and your “agent” will give you a cut of the prize money and make your little mob problem go away. You start at the 200th place and make your way to the 1st.
This sounds like it would take forever or be just one straight race, but it isn’t. The game is broken down into 10 stages, and each stage has various races. The terrain obviously changes a lot, and this means lots of different environments to look at, which gets help from EA’s latest Frostbite 2 engine that was used in Battlefield 3. While it doesn’t look as amazing as that game, it looks fantastic and is probably the best-looking NFS game to date. There are so many different places to race—snow, open fields, farms, factories, cities, you name it. There are several different race types, but they are thrown up variously, and the overall experience is repetitive.
Races range from gaining a certain number of positions to battling against the clock in elimination races. There are “boss” races that have you racing a good distance; there are also races solely against the clock to catch up time. That’s about all there is, and the only thing keeping you from getting really bored are the constantly changing environments, which are great to look at, and not one stage is the same. There are some better elements that make the game thrilling, and these are the survival sections. One has you running from an avalanche, another from a helicopter shooting at you, as well as a mountain demolition, but these are so far, and few of you yearn for them between the constant drag of gaining positions.
While these moments are highly entertaining, and probably the moments in the game, a few times Jack will get out of his car and initiate quick time events, which are also entertaining but pretty pointless since you normally don’t play an on-foot NFS game. Don’t worry, you don’t control him; just think of it as an interactive cutscene.
A great NFS game needs fast real-world cars, and there are plenty here, from Ferrari to Lamborghini. You will find them here. You can change cars by pulling into gas stations throughout stages, but overall, you usually stick with one car until the next group is unlocked. You can earn experience through things like drifting, jumping, overtaking cars, etc., but I found this kind of useless since you only earn one thing when leveling up, and it’s usually an avatar or something like that. You can use resets during a race if you crash or really screw up, but watch out; they are limited.
The game features Autolog, which everyone has grown to love, plus there are Challenge Series races to do after you beat the short 4-5 hour campaign mode. Multiplayer is pretty standard and nothing to write home about, but The Run is a fun weekend rental and nothing more. You will quickly forget about this one, but the whole idea is fun while it lasts.
The Need for Speed series has been seriously confused and hurtful since Most Wanted. While Shift was a simulator, the other ones in between have been either subpar or bad. Hot Pursuit revives the classic entry with the Burnout team behind the wheels, and this feels more like Burnout than Need for Speed, however. Using the Paradise engine, Criterion did a good job making the game both look pretty and giving us a Burnout feel with real-world cars. These are slick cars, ranging from Mustangs to Maseratis.
As the name would suggest, it’s about cops versus racers, and each opponent gets a set of four weapons. Cops get an EMP, helicopter, spike strip, and road block. Each is pretty self-explanatory, but this feels like a glorified version of Burnout’s Road Rage mode. Racers get the same, but instead of a helicopter and roadblock, they get a jammer and turbo, which is an extra boost for NOS. Now you can earn turbo by doing crazy stuff as well.
The world map is also classic Burnout style, with each icon labeled for a racer or cop, and there are previews, time trials, and special events for each side. There is also Autolog, which is a social networking type of setup. Your friend’s best scores will be posted, and you can post screenshots and videos of your races. If a friend beats your score, you can jump right into that race and try to beat it. While the single-player is fun, it’s the online stuff that makes the game shine with all the weapons. The single-player feels predictable and stale compared to multiplayer because it feels like this game was made with multiplayer in mind. You earn a bounty and have to hit certain goals in single-player, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen in racing games already.
Once you race, everything feels fine, but the steering tends to suffer drastically depending on the road conditions and the car. Despite awesome damage modeling, the cars all feel pretty much the same, and the sense of speed is so fast that you don’t notice speed differences. This also concludes the repetition because once you unlock all weapons, it’s just the same events over and over again, and some people may never even finish the single-player due to this. The game can also look pretty good at times, but in other ways, it doesn’t.
The chaos comes from the fact that in multiplayer, you never know what anyone is going to do. You can see a roadblock ahead and get your shot lined up to dodge it, but just then someone deploys a spike strip right in your face and you hit both, losing a crap ton of health. You can take off again and try to shake off a helicopter, but then get hit by an EMP. It’s the same with racers, but this can also feel a bit unbalanced since racers’ biggest weapon is the jammer, so cops can’t use their weapons for a few seconds. It all depends on the players’ skills and how they race.
Despite the repetition and lack of weapons, the game works, but also notice all the Burnout references. There’s hardly any need for speed in this game, despite the real-world cards and the Hot Pursuit title. This is just a weird mix-up of game identities, but it’s probably better to have a burnout feeling than an old, crappy NFS game rehashed. Criterion already had the engine built for something like this, so I expect to see a sequel in the near future. I do recommend this to Burnout fans more than NFS, however, but old-school Hot Pursuit fans will dig this completely.
Driving games are all about the cars whether it’s a simulator or arcade racer. A good driving game has responsive controls, slick cars, fun tracks, and customization options that suit the game.
While it has its flaws and was overhyped there’s no denying the attention to detail in GT5. With over 500 cars, tons of real-world tracks detailed to every crack, excellent tuning options, and a slick interface what’s there not to like? With the new special events, GT5 is oozing with awesome content for car lovers. So flaws aside it’s the attention to detail that won this over the rest.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.