Need for Speed 2015 - the review I didn't want to write.

In the days before Turn10 made Forza into the customer-milking franchise it has become, NFS was king. Having hoped ‘the Crew’ would be good enough to knock Forza off the top-spot and recreate what I love about car culture, as with many others I was left sorely disappointed despite some of the coolest cars I’ve ever been able to drive online. I bought Forza Horizon 2 and had to abandon my morals because I absolutely loved it. Then the new Need for Speed trailer dropped and finally there was hope. Hope that the gamer would be treated as a person and we would be given the street racing game we have always wanted.

As more and more videos dropped, I became more and more excited. Seeing the first game in years to feature a late-spec RX7 for me was the icing on the cake. Then I found out about EAs early access and couldnt throw my £3.99 at them fast enough - 10hrs of the full game. Bliss.

After finally downloading the mammoth 18GB file on my third-world internet, I patiently waited to connect to the games always-online system and finally was rewarded with some clever first-person cut-scenes. At 29 I’m probably a bit old to use words like ‘bae’ and I’m long-since out of my fist-pumping days, but I looked past that and finally got my hands on the customisation. Frankly, it’s brilliant. One of the biggest things I resented Forza for as each new title was released is that the modifications haven’t really changed since the game first came out. Need for Speed has successfully knocked it for six with this, with a good selection of different and relevant mods. You’re able to change just about everything visually that you would want to, allowing you to create an understated street-car or a balls-out bozo drifter. Frankly this should be set as the benchmark for all future car games.

Unfortunately, this is where the honeymoon ends. Let’s start at the most obvious point - the handling. I think we all knew it would be terrible and it is. You do get used to it eventually and after six hours playing the game I’m now comfortable with it, but for those of you who played ‘the Crew’ this is very similar.

Then, there’s the always-online aspect. It infuriates me that games even do this. It doesn’t promote community-involvement any more than having a multiplayer option does, but it does mean you can’t escape from the kinds of people who fill youtube comments sections up. On a busy evening, you’ll struggle to complete any single-player story mission as even on the early-access there were kids just driving round smashing into people. Stupidly, you can’t pause a race either. So if you start a ten-minute race you better be sure that there’s no impending visitor, power-cut or house-fire because you’re in for the duration.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. I would say the customisation is almost good enough to mask those two. My beautiful Z pictured on this article is proof enough of that. Hands-down the worst thing about it is the rubber-banding of the AI cars - theres essentially no skill in winning the races, its just sheer luck. On one race I punted Magnus Walker into an oncoming lorry at 140mph barely twenty seconds into the race and saw with my own eyes his Porsche flip onto its roof. Two corners later he overtook me and I continued to spend the rest of that hour repeating the same three minute race before I finally succeeded. This despite the fact that my RX7 is as upgraded as it can be. Ive since done all those missions and now have his Porsche which is obviously much slower than my FD. Its so horrifically unbalanced and unrewarding that it completely ruins the game.

Ultimately, theres a lot I really like about the game but I kind of feel like theyve hired a lot of clever people who have done a really good job of whatever they were asked to do, but fundamentally they were polishing a game that was terrible in its most basic form. I think not being able to pause it is daft too. When some races are ten minutes long, what do you do if someone rings the phone, abducts your missus or sets fire to your front door? Because if youve been playing the same race for an hour and youre finally in with a chance of winning, I guarantee you will be angry enough to let all of those things happen until you finish the race.

So close, yet so far. Pity.