Forward Notes
My roommate was actually the first to own this game. I helped him beat through it, along with my other roommate. Following this, I actually liked the game so much that I beat it on the second roommate’s account, and then part of a third partial account, before finally receiving the game for Christmas and starting to work through it on my account. Therefore, although it says I don’t have all of the achievements yet on the side, you can be assured that I have played this game religiously. I now have 100% in this game. Let’s get onto the review.
Single Player
When you load up your game and enter into the single player career you will be shown a map, which will be your hub from where you select each of your missions. The types of missions are divided into racer and cop missions, which are further divided into subcategories. Let me go over them here:
Race – You and a number of racers (it can range from two others to seven others) have to travel a set distance. The time that you have to do this in will vary widely since the aptitude of the computer controlled racers can change each time.
Time Trial – You must travel a set distance in a minimum time.
Duel – You compete against one other racer in a competition to get to the finish line first.
Gauntlet – A time trial in the sense that you must get to a certain point in a certain amount of time, but this mode adds in cops specifically aimed at taking you down.
Preview – A time trial using a specific car, often times one that you may not have unlocked yet.
Racer Hot Pursuit – You compete against other racers to travel a set amount of distance in a race but with cops trying to stop you.
Cop Hot Pursuit – You attempt to stop the racers before they reach a set distance in the fastest time possible
Rapid Response – You attempt to travel a set distance as a cop in a specified amount of time while not crashing, which adds time penalties.
Interceptor – You attempt to stop one racer who is trying to escape the authorities without him distancing himself too greatly from you.
In total there are probably over a hundred of these sub missions to choose from. Each mission has some value assigned to it in order to achievement 1st place, or what is called “distinction” in the cop events. There is also a second place number, or “merit”, as well as a third place or “pass” time / qualifying amount. Doing well and placing in these events will earn you bounty, the experience used in the game for leveling up. It is also possible to earn bounty inside the races for doing tasks, such as drifting or slipstreaming.
In order to make the game much more interesting, the game utilizes a weapons system in a number of the missions, especially in the cop oriented ones. These are triggered by using the Dpad, and include a spike strip (dropped behind your car), an EMP (aimed at a car ahead of you), a Road Block (formed by cop cars), and the ability to call in a helicopter (who drops spike strips in front of the racers). There is also a Turbo sometimes present on the Dpad, which shoots the racer forward at an incredible speed for about ten seconds. The last Dpad item is a “jammer”, which prevents cars in the vicinity of the user from using any of their weapons or viewing their mini map.
Beyond doing damage with these weapons, your also capable of simply ramming your opponent with your car. Each car has a health bar located above it which signifies how close the racer/cop is to being “taken out”. Taking out a cop car as a racer or a racer as a cop car will subsequently fill your boost (not to be confused with the Dpad Turbo) which you can think of as nitrous, which helps you gain speed. This nitrous bar automatically refills slowly throughout the race, though it will refill faster if the user drifts or drives into oncoming traffic as a racer.
Crashing happens in the races when you hit a wall with enough force or another car head-on. Just like any of the other cars, you have a health bar, and it will be affected about a fourth of health for every major collision. Other smaller things, such as a ram by a police car, will affect your health proportionally. Once the health bar reaches zero, the mission is over, and you will be forced to restart. This is an added threat to keep in mind when participating in every event, including races without cops even present.
Single Player Score – 9/10
Multiplayer
There are two areas of multiplayer worth mentioning. The first is the online accessed through xbox live. Here you can compete against other humans in events such as races and hot pursuits. The matchmaking works rather well as you can simply jump into a quick match after choosing the type of event you would like to participate in and the series of cars. The winner of the match is determined through a point system – so whoever gets the “final blow” on a car doesn’t automatically win if another player did all of the damage to it previously.
The main issue with any online multiplayer in a game that takes quick reflexes is that any lag is a tremendous issue, which happens in about half of the matches I played. The matches can also get a bit frustrating as human racers do all in their power to avoid being taken down – including driving backwards or through routes that make no logical sense. Luckily the game integrated a time limit to try to deter this a bit, and finishing first of your group is superior to finishing third in terms of points gathered. The game doesn’t have an online ranking system that I found, but rather the points earned contribute to your same level that the single player points accumulate to, which can be a bit disappointing for diehard online fans. Lastly, if you are eliminated, you are forced to go into a “dead man’s view” of the other players. While this is better than a black screen or something of the sort, it can still get extremely boring, especially in the case of a human player driving backwards or in circles, or in the case of a player that has decided not to really participate.
The other notable multiplayer function is the leaderboards, called the “speedwall”. No matter your time, it is posted to the speedwall for your friends to see and compete against. Before every event, given that you have friends with the game, the game will propose a challenge for you, to beat “X player’s time”. Do so and you have the ability to post it to their wall – a virtual area of the game that basically says “Hey, X user beat your time, try to beat them back”. This increases the replay value of the game considerably and is one of, if not my favorite, part of the game. Unfortunately there are no global leaderboards, but I find competing against my friends much more fun anyway.
The main drawback to the online multiplayer however is the necessity for an “online pass” – a code given with a purchase of the new game that allows you access to the online multiplayer. The pass can also be bought for a set amount of Microsoft points if you don’t have access to the code from inside the game.
Multiplayer Score – 8/10
Graphics/Sound/DLC/Intangibles:
Let me go over everything first, then I’ll go into more detail at the bottom of this section in terms of how I feel about it…
Since the game was released in 2010, you can expect up to date graphics. There are a plethora of real cars to choose from, and since I know quite a few people will be interested, here’s a list of some:
Alfa Romeo 8C Spider, Aston Martin One-77, Audi R8 Spyder, Bugatti Veyron, Chevy Camaro, Dodge Charger, Ford Shelby GT, Lamborghini Gallardo, Jaguar XKR, Lamborghini Reventon, Mazda RX-8, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren 722 Edition, Pagani Zonda Cinque, Porsche 911, and the Koenigsegg CCX, as well as many others…
The cars look rather good, and sometimes even include motion during the races (the Bugatti releases its spoiler as it reaches a certain speed). Crashing a car, performing a take down, or hitting an opponent with a weapon will trigger a cutscene that often shows massive devastation, and I can remember quite vividly a couple of times going “Oh crap, that guy got rocked!”.
The game also utilizes cut scenes before each mission to try to “set up the situation”, as you see a bunch of cop cars chasing a racer, or something of the sort. When you receive enough points that one of your Dpad items receives an upgrade, or when you reach a new level, you’ll receive a cutscene indicating such. There are also cutscenes explaining to you how each type of event works when you approach it for the first time.
The sound in the game is divided into two aspects: racing sounds and music. As far as the racing sounds go, they are solid, as you’ll hear the sound of boosting, tires squeeling, and cops using their radios to call in speeding. A lot of the time the audio can be very helpful in helping you figure out where to go and what lies ahead of you, and also helps you keep a sense of the racers around you. The music includes various artists, including one of my favorites, Chiddy Bang, who is featured on their commercial. Beyond that there is also 30 seconds to Mars, Benny Benassi, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Bad Religion, and Pendulum. Basically there is going to be a bit of rap/hip-hop and some pop as well.
Updated March 6th 2012: There are three DLC packs for this game. This has been largely positively received, but I have heard complaints that some wished they would have designed a new track as well. Beyond that, a number of cars have also been released for download for free after they attempted to get users to watch a youtube video one million times (it got about half way there). There are also cars available for purchase from the store if you’re so inclined.
Now onto how I actually feel about all of this. First of all, when you load the game up for the first time, you’re absolutely forced to watch a trailer for Shift 2, a new game they will be releasing. Beyond this you’re physically forced to watch every cutscene in between races, explaining to you how to do each event if you’ve never participated in it before, showing every upgrade you receive, showing each rank up you get, and inside the races everytime a new type of cop appears, everytime they show a new upgraded attack for the first time(they’ll zoom in and text will appear that will say “Level 2 roadblock” for instance), and every time you take down a racer or cop. While this can all be helpful, (knowing that you get penalties in rapid responses, for instance) this can also be extremely annoying, especially if you’ve played the game before or are playing it through a second time. Inside the races, the game kind of just “drives for you” during these cutscenes, which means that you’ll have to figure out what to do when you’re “thrown back in”, which has often led to me yelling at the television saying “THANKS GAME” because I’m headed straight for a wall.
The music can either be love it or hate it for sure, and for the most part I was disappointed with it. I think some classic tunes would have fit better into the game, especially in the cop missions, and I played it on my computer accordingly. Luckily the game has a menu interface that allows you to turn off the music volume while keeping the rest of the audio effects on. The DLC is fun, and I’m glad they gave some of it to you for free, but in many of the missions they taunt you during your car selection when you highlight a car saying “buy this in the marketplace”, which is a bit of a turn off to me.
The loading times can be a bit of a pain. Before each race, the cutscene that is supposed to “give you the feel”, gets very repetitive, and even though it prompts that you can skip it with the A button, you’re still forced to watch a good portion of it as the game loads. Burning the game to the harddrive helped a bit, but not considerably. That being said, the loading times weren’t horrible, it was mostly just my frustration with the unskippable cutscenes.
There are quite a few intangibles in the game that really make it special to me. Firstly, they randomize the events that occur inside the missions – you will rarely see the same traffic pattern for example. If you continually restart a mission over and over, many of the cars will act differently – sometimes one will even crash within the first twenty seconds giving you a quick take down. This means that times can vary widely, making improving your time on the speedwall just that much more fun to try to work towards. This can also be a turn off to some people since they consider it “unfair” and not a “true test of skill”, but I view it as more of practice and patience leading to benefits. The game is also excellent at utilizing the “wow” factor when viewing the take downs that you create. Beyond that, the tracks are interesting and varied, and include shortcuts, some of which assist on certain missions while others only slow you down – in other words, exploration and excursion are not only available, but encouraged.
Negatively, the game seems to have a real issue with allowing you to do damage with the back of your car, which has not only ruined my times quite a few times, but actually resulted in me failing missions that I would have otherwise excelled at. The controls take some getting used to, but that's to be expected with any racing game. I would also get randomly signed out of the autolog (you need to be connected to live for it), while still having my xbox live connection, and their button of pressing "start" while in the hub to reconnect rarely worked, forcing me to quit to the dashboard and reload the game if I wanted to reconnect. The different types of events are liked by different types of people - I for one love the cop events the best and completed those way faster than the racer events. Quite a few people find the rapid responses annoying. One of the biggest drawbacks was the camera angles unfortunately - I like to drive from inside the car every once in a while, but it proved virtually impossible, forcing me to drive from the view of behind the car the entire game.
Graphics – 9/10 Sound – 6/10 DLC – 9/10 Intangibles – 6/10
Total Section Score: 7.5/10
Achievements:
I rather liked the achievements in this game and found them a pleasure to work towards. There are multiplayer achievements, so if you do intend to 100% this one, you will have to shell out for the online pass or buy a new copy of the game at some point. However, these online achievements don’t require boosting whatsoever since they only require you to complete the missions inside the online play – you don’t even have to win. There are a number of these, and they are rather straight forward:
The single player has a wide range of achievements, most notably for getting first place/distinction in every mission and ranking up. These have quite a high TA ratio since they can take a considerable amount of time:
Besides that there are quite a few oddball achievements that really help you explore all of the game’s functionality – from taking pictures to uploading times to your friend’s walls, to beating said times. There are also oddball achievements that simply require you to fulfill certain requirements inside a race such as:
Quite a few of these will pop right away, giving you about three hundred gamerscore in the first couple hours of gameplay if you’re competent whatsoever. The game also includes some oddball achievements that the developers clearly liked, but are very easily obtained, such as:
All in all I was rather pleased with the achievement list and felt that it was more than fair and a very capable 1000/1000, without being overly easy. The only issue is the online pass if you’re buying this used.
Achievement Score: 9/10
Final Score: 8.38/10 = 4.18/5 = 4/5
Final Thoughts:
I think this game was absolutely brilliant and I actually voted for it for game of the year. That being said, it isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely a racing game worth checking out if you like the genre whatsoever. I think it has some of the best replay value of any game on the market with the use of the speedwalls and top level graphics and gameplay really make it stand out. I hope you enjoyed my review, please leave any comments below if you feel them necessary, thanks!
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