Need for Speed: Rivals Review -- A Launch To Remember

Need for Speed: Rivals is a seemingly simple concept: take the open world philosophy of Most Wanted and Hot Pursuit and throw a bunch of players into the world together as they go about their business.

Yes, you can play Rivals offline if you so choose, but that’s not the ideal way to play what amounts to the best launch title on the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Flying solo as the only sentient entity on the map was great in previous games, sure, but this one fundamental change to the way the world works in Rivals takes Need for Speed to a new level of greatness.

In Rivals you are either cop or racer. When a racer, you drive fast, gank up other racers, goad the cops into chases that hopefully will end up totalling their expensive squad cars.  When a cop, you drive fast, try not to total your expensive squad car, catch those pesky racers who fly around the countryside endangering the civilians. It is, for lack of a better term, a war, and each side has some tricky tech at its disposal in addition to the large and heavy projectiles they drive. 

All of that is pretty familiar. But if you’re wired up when you boot the game, you’ll be tossed into a version of Red View County in which five other human players are taking part in the war on whichever side they chose. Your activities may not involve them, not theirs you. The player limit is small enough that you may not even see the other folks, despite the way each of you can see on the map where every other player is located at all times.

And since the goal of the game is not necessarily to grief everyone else in the session -- you need to complete campaign objectives that don’t involve other players if you want to unlock new cars -- and given the immense size of the map is a hedge against harassment, the way these sessions have gone for me is like this: I play Rivals as I did Hot Pursuit solo, but from time to time one of the cops chasing me, or one of the racers I’m chasing, or one of the cops who shows up to help me chase a racer is another human. It’s not exactly a random occurrence, because human behavior can’t be, but when it happens it’s the very definition of ratcheting it up to 11. 

Having now experienced this for a number of hours, it’s not difficult to understand why Ubisoft has a similar concept, The Crew, in development that requires a connection. I think allowing offline play is still a necessary feature, but I’ll stress once again that you shouldn’t if you don’t have to. Always having comrades at arms and living, breathing foes thrown into this war with you and all those AIs is such an exciting, if difficult to quantify why, and dynamic experience. 

It’s less difficult to quantify how new-gen Rivals is. This one is as visually stellar as GRID 2 on the PC, but the weather pushes it into its own category of pretty. Every time you visit your command center as a cop or safehouse as a racer the weather will change, and the stark alterations to the landscape tend to be both shocking and extremely welcome. It’ll be nice out one time, and then later it’s the middle of fall and leaves are falling all around you in spectacular if absurd fashion, and then it will rain. It would have been worthy of a gawking stare or two anyway, but new-gen video game weather is as neat a thing as new-gen video game lighting. Particles!

To bring the whole thing together you’re going to need to turn up the sound and crank the bass. When you’re crossing an intersection and get t-boned, or when you do that to somebody else, it’s really upsetting if you’ve got, say, some bass-heavy headphones on. It’s the closest thing this game has to pain feedback, and high-speed collisions scare me every time.

What is Rivals? It’s the assertion that EA’s true flagship for the core in the new generation isn’t Battlefield, but Need for Speed.  It’s thrilling, it’s beautiful, it’s chaotic, and it’s the best thing going on those expensive new black boxes you have. Ghost Games, the spawn of Criterion, really brought it.

Final Verdict

10 out of 10

P.S. Protip: if you suck at driving in Rivals, choose the version of your car with good handling.

A copy of the game was purchased by the reviewer.