You choose a stock character from a line-up of 12 characters, choose a car from the 5, and then you are sent into the open world to win races and complete activities. These activities are your usual open world type objectives: smashing billboards, finding collectables, completing jumps, tearing through speed checks etc.
The races are a mix of circuits and point to point. The races have checkpoints that you must pass through. There's scope to cut some corners, but often there's buildings, natural rails and race barriers to stop you deviating from most paths. It is always helpful to glance at your map to see what is coming up.
Most races involve roads, but there are some off-road events, or races that are partially off-road. There's also some Drift events where you are scored by drifting; larger angles and length of time increases your reward, as does the multiplier when completing consecutive drifts.
There's a day and night races which is a major part of the game. The day events give you cash, and are legal races, so there's no worry of attracting the police. The night races give you reputation and have the possibility of triggering a police chase.
Police chases are rated 1-5. At level 1, you will be chased by a couple of cars. At level 5, there's loads of police, helicopters and a "Rhino" van that can do large damage. Ramming the police seems to do just as much damage to you, but you can push them into other cars/walls/obstacles or try and spin them around in order to aid your escape. Once you have left their line of sight, you need to remain out of sight for the pursuit to be called off. You need a fast car and a decent racing ability to be able to escape level 3 police and above.
You can usually complete one night race without attracting the police, but raising your heat level gives you a reputation multiplier, and you only receive the full amount when you reach a safe house. This gives an interesting risk vs reward mechanic. If you do get caught by the police, then you lose your multiplier (but get to keep the base reputation) and are fined a large amount of cash.
There is a meter that fills up if police surround you when you are travelling at low speeds. I never got busted this way. The few times I did get busted was because they smashed up my car. The police are aggressive, but I was also aggressive back. You can repair your car 3 times during the night which is performed by passing through petrol stations.
Reputation levels you up, which then unlocks more races, car part upgrades, and fancier cars to purchase. This means you essentially do batches of Night races to unlock things to purchase, then do many Day races to acquire the money to actually purchase them.
You can choose to play Online or Solo. Online means you see other cars driving about and can join their party. If you get disconnected then you lose your progress since the last save, even if you weren't actually driving with anyone. You cannot pause the races either, even if no human is driving in your race.
The graphics are decent enough but there are fancier looking racing games out there. I though the game looks better at night, which I think is partially due to the neon light aesthetic. The game features some nice rain effects; the way it pours and all the nice looking puddles that populate the ground.
The music selection is a mix of rap and electronic. I felt the music seemed to fit the night races better.
It's hard to get the balance right in these games. However, there were loads of races on the map, and I did many of them in a row without tweaking my car, yet my car was better than the opposition in each of the races. I could manually remove some of the upgrades, but why isn't there an option to automatically do this? I have seen that feature in some other games.
However, the "recommended" value often seemed quite arbitrary. Sometimes the value was 200, but when you do the race, you see an opponent with a 220 car, and the rest are 200 or below. Maybe that is a good recommended value as it means there is 1 opponent that you have to be more skilful to beat, rather than relying on the sheer power of your car. However, I did find that often the highest value car didn't even win, but maybe a 180 rated car would charge ahead and stay there for the entire race.
Even though there's plenty of cars to purchase, I only used a few across the course of the game. I feel the game is more suited to sticking with a car and upgrading the parts. When you need to take part in a different style of event, then you just need to switch out the tyres and differential. I initially bought a Land Rover when I came across the off-road events. I spent a lot of cash when kitting it out with the best parts I unlocked; but it still wasn't good enough to win the off-road event. I ended up switching back to my road car and bought the off-road tyres which did the trick.
There are several Safe Houses around the map which act as quick travel points during the day (and night when you don't have any reputation to cash in). Any safe house you enter then takes you to your garage. This means you then have to endure another loading screen as you quick travel back to where you actually want to be.
The story involves a corrupt cop who essentially steals racers cars. I felt that this quest line ended as soon as it started getting interesting. I was very surprised when the game told me I'd finished the campaign. I expected there to be more twists and turns. Also, I felt there were much better cars and upgrades to get which I thought would be required to "complete" the game. Obviously, there were many races to complete and some other post-game content.
I'm not a fan of open world racing games, but I got this game via Origin Access Premier so I gave it a go. I had enough fun with it, and I felt it was better than quite a few other open world racing games. However, it's nothing special.