Need For Speed Heat Review

I do so dearly love the smell of burning oil coming out of the back of the beat-up 1992 Honda Civic hatchback with a bolt-on body kit in the morning. If there’s one series that’s allowed me to play out my OG Fast and the Furious fantasies, it’s Need for Speed, and while it’s been a series of ups and downs for the franchise, at its best it’s always been some of the greatest arcade racing you could get your hands on. Things got a bit more complicated when Forza Horizon entered the scene, and with the release of Forza Horizon 4, arcade racing games have a hell of a lot more to live up to than just making your car look cool and strapping NOS tanks to the floor.

More recent titles certainly haven’t hit quite as hard as say, Need for Speed Underground 2 or Need for Speed Most Wanted, and it’s felt like a franchise with an identity crisis for some time now, but the release of Need for Speed Heat caught the attention of many. I was one of those people, and I was particularly interested in whether or not Need for Speed had found its rhythm again, or if it was still trying to find its way. There is no question that there was more than a little inspiration taken from the Forza Horizon franchise when developing Heat, and while that’s not a bad thing, it does make it much easier to draw direct comparisons to the competition – and the competition is a lot better in just about every way.

Heat kicks off in much the way that others have in the past, playing out much like the early Fast and the Furious film. You’re a street racer who has a run-in with the special task force branch of the local police department. Fueled with a substantial amount of college bro energy, the cops involved largely seem to be obsessed with not just shutting down the illegal racing rings, but taking out the racers themselves if necessary. Thankfully, a lady officer in a tight leather suit pulls up on her superbike to talk some sense into the dude bros about to act out their own snuff film, and you’re sent on your way. That’s all in the shoes of another racer, your real story starts as a newbie that shows up in the shop of the family you just saw involved in the previous race.

You can pick your character’s general look from a list of pre-made, and from there you can later change clothes and whatnot to make them more your own should you feel like it and really want to stand out in cutscenes. You’re then tasked with selecting your first car which ranges in racing styles from straight-line muscle, to track, and drifting. This is your first real look at how Heat has simplified the tuning system to slot into the various race types you’ll encounter as you play. The four categories are race, road, drift, and off-road. You’ll be able to see where your car falls into these categories on a nifty graph that plots a point representative of your car and its tuning. This graph will also be used to let you know what kind of race you’re getting yourself into before you jump in, which you can then use as a guide to either change your car’s tuning to match or swap cars altogether. It’s a good concept, and while the actual tuning of the cars being useful is often debatable except for the extremes, I think it’s a generally good model for the series to continue to make use of.

That’s perhaps one of the biggest issues I have with Heat, until you’re out on the extremes of that graph, every vehicle feels almost identical to race. There’s very little nuance between tunes until you’ve gone full-blown drift, for example. Even off-road specific vehicles aren’t that far-flung from a track car in feel, and usually all it comes down to is the speed on or off the tarmac, and how much you have to rely on perhaps the worst feature in the game – corner drifting. Early on the game will prompt you about how to best keep your speed going through corners. Even in arcade racing games, it usually boils down to the slow in, fast out concept but with a lot more leeway in how poorly you can enter and exit. In Need for Speed Heat, you’re told to double tap the gas which prompts the car to kick its ass end out like you were going to drift and power through the corner. This may sound good in theory, but it results in some really awful feeling handling even when you’re in a beast of a track car.

There is no such thing as feathering the gas or braking into a corner with finesse. Any sort of usual technique you may be used to applying to cornering will result in your car almost always going into a drift whether you want it to or not. This becomes particularly frustrating on the very tight courses set up for time trial racing. You simply do not have the room for your car to Tokyo Drift its way around every corner, so keeping your car from being a squirrely mess can be a nightmare. I’ve played a lot of racing games, both arcade and semi-simulators like Forza and Gran Turismo, but I’ve never had such a hard time controlling a vehicle as I have with Heat. Unfortunately, the biggest knock against Heat is that the driving is by far the weakest part of the game, which of course for a racing game is the opposite of what you’d expect or at least certainly hope for.

The ironic counter to Heat’s driving deficiency is that of all the things, the story, characters, and voice acting are great. The voice acting in particular is almost jarringly good, despite not every line written being particularly Shakespearian. Characters are emoted extremely well, the motion capture work is better than most I’ve seen recently, and everyone seems to be a natural fit. It’s almost so good that it approaches feeling wasted on the game, but I like the idea of arcade racers having some heart and soul dumped into whatever loosely written B-movie storyline that runs through them.

Progressing through the story, however, can be a bit of a chore. While games like Forza Horizon have evolved passed the old methods of earning “cred” or “reputation” to gain access to other races, or even worse gating you based on your vehicle’s ranking or type, Need for Speed Heat isn’t quite ready to let it all go. You’ll be required to have a certain amount of reputation to access a number of things, whether it be the story missions or the higher-up modifications for your cars. You earn these points by racing of course, but the majority of the points are earned during nighttime racing.

Heat has an interesting split where what is available to you during the day is different from what is available at night. Doing races at night will raise your Heat level – basically how bad the cops want to chase you down. The higher your Heat level, the more aggressive and harder to lose the cops will be but the more reputation you’ll gain should you get back to a safe house in one piece. Some races are even gated by Heat level and are appropriately called “High Heat Races.” They typically require at least three-star Heat level and will net you more points as well as a car part only attainable via these races.

You can also earn some cash and rep doing some challenges that rotate out sort of like you might see in some mobile games or MMOs. The rewards aren’t anything to write home about usually, and so I didn’t personally make any attempts to complete them. It’s also possible to team up with others to form a crew online, but I didn’t get a chance to see what this was like. On the surface, it seems like it was mostly what you’d expect and it’s always nice to have the option to play with friends if you wish.

Daytime racing can earn you some reputation but mostly you’ll earn the majority of your money during the day instead. There’s no real rep gating here outside of story missions, but you will see a suggested car level for each race which you may want to be within striking distance of or higher before entering. There are difficulty levels as well that you can change to at any time, but if you’re a half-decent driver there’s not a heck of a lot of challenge without being on hard mode and entering races at a car level disadvantage. Easy lives up to its name, and while it makes the game trivial for anyone with any real experience in driving games, I’m sure it would be welcomed by those who aren’t so skilled.

Cop chases, however, don’t really seem to vary much between difficulty levels at higher Heat. I had a 15-minute chase at full five-star Heat in both easy and hard modes, and the result was the same. The cops are incredibly hard to shake off even in a good car, and this seems to be a known issue as there are many videos showcasing how to cheese your way out of the worst chases. Ramps in particular seem to throw off the AI, and there are some areas whereby diving your car into the water will see the cops follow you in and take themselves out.

We all know that the real cornerstone of the Need for Speed games has always been modifying your cars, and Heat delivers pretty much what you’d expect in that department. You’ll have a range of body modifications and parts to choose from, and you can take your cars in nearly any direction you feel like. Want to off-road race in a Challenger? You can do that. What to drift in the same Challenger? That’s possible, too. You may not get the best results, but you can pretty much do whatever you want with your vehicles if you apply the right parts which is nice to see. I also appreciated that when you purchase a new car it will give you a rating on just how much the body can be modified, so if you were looking to do something crazy you’ll have a good idea ahead of time if it’s the car to do it with.

The modifications themselves are generally what you’d expect, with a range of both bolt-on body kits and some proper body modifications. There’s a good selection of rims to choose from, and you’ll even be able to choose from some forward side view mirrors if you’re into that kind of thing. I did wish you could apply the same rims, calipers, and rotors to the front and back all at once but you can only purchase the front and back separately. You can colour everything the same at once, at least, so that’s nice. Livery options are par for the course but aren’t quite Forza levels of insanity. It’s easy to find, apply, and even modify community-made liveries, and there seems to be a healthy number of them should you be interested. A rough spot, though, is that whether it’s for selecting what parts of the car to modify or to apply your anime artwork to, the selection system is a bit awkward and it should probably be less cumbersome to view your car during the process. Nevertheless, Heat checks the customization boxes most people would be interested in while leaving just enough open for those who want to dig a bit deeper.

One of the first things that grabbed my attention when I saw Heat for the first time, was the aesthetic. The 80s neon pink and blue look was and continues to be in vogue, and it’s obvious that Heat was made to be at its best when showing off that look. While it certainly isn’t an ugly game during the daytime, the game looks its best during the nighttime racing when all the lights and colours can really come to life. Perhaps the oddest visual aspect of Heat, however, is the nearly ever-present rain. You can’t seem to go more than two minutes without it raining, and when it rains in Heat it rains hard. Whoever did the rain effect really wanted to show everyone how good it looks, and while it does look good, it gets a bit tiring when you’re getting a torrential downpour in the middle of the day without a cloud in the sky. The performance isn’t quite up to the visuals, sadly, and even with a 5820k and 2080ti I couldn’t hold a steady 120fps at 1440p. In fact, the game more or less hung out around 80-90fps even on medium settings so I just locked it to 60 and turned everything up to the highest quality which ran fine. Coming from Forza Horizon, where I can easily push 120fps at 1440p with the settings turned way up, it was a bit disappointing.

The audio is just ok, with cars sounding about as good as NOS-fueled, dual turbo-charged family cars can (though of course, the hypercars sound more expensive). The soundtrack is mostly disappointing and suffers the usual licensed music trap of hearing the same songs every ten minutes. I’m not sure what else to expect, but somehow the soundtrack didn’t match the look and feel of the game, and since we’re in the land of mumble rap you’ll want to be a fan to enjoy some of these tracks.

I know I’ve referenced Forza Horizon several times in this review, and it’s for good reason. Need for Speed Heat really goes out of its way to take a lot of what makes Horizon great and tries to shoehorn it into the Need for Speed formula. It mostly works, honestly, but as I mentioned before it opens itself up to a lot of unfavourable comparisons. Heat is ultimately a mashup of Underground and Most Wanted but doesn’t quite achieve the quality of either. It’s certainly a marked improvement in terms of finding its own style again, but I think they need one more game of this formula to nail it down. It’s a pleasant surprise to see such fantastic voice acting in a game that you wouldn’t expect it to be in, but if you’re going to make a racing game you need to at the very least knock the driving out of the park and Heat just doesn’t do that. In a world where Forza Horizon exists, Need for Speed Heat doesn’t quite do enough to be more than an average racer.