The last in a long line of extremely disappointing NFS games.
I used to be an NFS fanatic, during the good old days of the first Hot Pursuit games, NFS Underground 1/2, Most Wanted. This version, however, is as frustrating as, if not more than, Pro Street.
The driving physics is terrible, and the car control is close to non-existent. When cars hit you, you'll go plowing into the guard-railing, even if leaning into the hit, while if you hit another car, it shrugs off the impact with almost no ill-effects. Doesn't matter if you hit it in its direction of travel or against. Spike strips sometimes won't impact the car behind, even if you can see with your own eyes that it hit directly. And if you DO manage to hit a car with the strips, you'll have to STOP and TURN AROUND to be able to bust the racer. Even if it means that the rest of the racers just continue on their way. Also, when the cut-scene comes on to show you've taken the racer out with a strip, the controls doesn't reactivate until a few seconds AFTER you've resumed control of your car, so you'll end up driving much farther away from the potential bust than you really had to, which means the racer will have STARTED RACING AGAIN. How stupid is that. But once you hit a strip, it's game over.
Another thing is that you'll most likely restart the same challenge over and over, because of all the things previously described, and that means waiting for the reload, and MULTIPLE "hit enter" events in between. And even AFTER you've hit enter to skip the opening cinematic, it still shows you almost the whole thing, so you end up waiting for a long, long time between restarts. And you'll have to restart over and over, because there's no point in not getting the gold medal in each event. Don't get me wrong. The game isn't HARD. With driving physics from decent car games like GRID or PGR, this game would have been dead easy. But the controls are so sloppy, unresponsive and downright stupid, that the game becomes nearly impossible to play.
And then there's this. NO CUSTOMIZATION! WHAT? In an NFS game? It's unheard of since the mid 90's. And since the cars are given to you for free, the price tag they carry is COMPLETELY superfluous. Why even WASTE the screen space on something so ridiculously irrelevant? But seriously. Since NFSU, the series has been known for it's robust customization, and now it seems that Criterion doesn't know how to implement it. Imbeciles.
Then there's the Free Roam "element", which is entirely redundant, because nothing whatsoever happens. I spent a long time just driving around in both a racer and a cop car without seeing the slightest bit of action. Why put it in there if it doesn't serve a purpose?
It seems they thought that "Hey, if we just glue enough multiplayer functions on this B-tch, we don't have to make a real game! We'll save MILLIONS!" Great. Make me waste 60 bucks on a game, so YOU GUYS CAN SAVE MONEY! For F sakes, Criterion. Did you take over the NFS franchise JUST to make sure it was killed off? I'll tell you something: Black Box was MORE than capable of doing that themselves!
I've forgotten half the things that bugged me about the game, and I'm sure I'll remember it again as soon as I post this, but as a conclusion I just want to say that I gave this game a WAY higher score than it deserves, just because it managed to hype itself up so much that it made me PAY MONEY for the canine feces that this game really is. It's not often I get tricked by marketing ploys, but Criterion, this time you REALLY managed to oversell your product.
DON'T BUY THIS GAME. It's a complete waste of money. I bet even "Decision Points" is better value for money than this.