God this is STILL one of the best-looking racing games ever made despite being over 10 years old but is also STILL one of the worst-handling racing games in an established franchise.
Usually when modern Need for Speed games aren't being discussed for their lacklustre customisation, let-down-soundtrack or brake-to-drift driving model, you can at least say they're easy to have fun slammin your foot to the floor and just gunning it regardless of how your car is built. But this is NFS 2015. This one is not fun.
When you're just drivin and vibin, having a chill time just casually cruising around the open world, it can be a nice time, but that's not what anyone is here for and it's not how the progression system works. You have to do races and drift events, and both display how awful this game feels to drive in any direction that isn't a straight line. Frequently I experienced;
- Cars not steering at all after coming out of a turn no matter which way I steered
- Drift cars that sometimes refused to start a drift without the handbrake
- Grip cars that barely turn at max steering response regardless of speed
- Cars that crab-walk straight into the wall when hitting the handbrake whilst drifting
- Cars that don't turn at all whilst braking
- Cars whose steering felt so delayed I would describe it best as "My steering has to learn a new language every time I try to go from one direction to another."
AND
- Servers that are so temperamental I can be kicked from race progress or customisation depending on how it feels about the way I last blinked at my screen.
This wouldn't be oh-so-bad if it weren't for the fact that this is an online-only game. Despite it having mostly a single-player focus. So not only is the game bad to drive in, but depending on the game's mood, it won't even let you play for long before it kicks you back to the main menu. I would advise using one of the many mods that, along with changing the handling model, lets the game be played offline, but for as good as the game looks, I feel you have to really love how it looks to bother going through that. Or if you're desperate for a Need for Speed game that has any Toyotas in them (this was the last one as of writing, as nobody's sure if it's because of exclusivity deals with other racing games or Toyota not wanting their cars in games involving illegal activity or both).
It also doesn't help that you feel like an idiot for trying to engage with the game's performance upgrades and handling tuning.
Built your car for drifts? Well now you have to fight it to get out of one drift so you're in the right position to start the next. Want to use the handbrake during a drift to readjust more easily? Tough, now your car will crab-walk straight into a wall, and you get no say in the matter.
Built your car for races and tuned it for grip? Well now you have to slow down so much before every turn unless you want to end up in the wall, and you don't even get a good enough speed advantage for it, so any other player or bot will have an advantage coming out of the corner despite them drifting around it.
Didn't do much of a build at all and just slapped on the highest performance parts you could and kept it right in the middle of grip and drift? Guaranteed win for any event that isn't against a real person, but even then it's likely you'll win anyway.
Typical for me and the modern Need for Speeds, unfortunately the soundtrack didn't resonate with me at all so I muted the music and opted for my own playlists. Hoping the next one that comes along breaks that pattern but so far it's 4 for 4 (I know this and the other two aren't seen as anywhere near bad compared to Unbound but honestly I feel it's worse to have a soundtrack you feel nothing about than one that you feel is outright bad since music taste is highly subjectable).
Also for some reason this game tries placing some emphasis on the cops, but they're about as anaemic as the handling. They're so ineffective, useless and cowardly that on max heat I kept having to keep my speed below 135mph just to make sure I didn't accidentally outrun them in a mid-level car. You escape the police just as quickly as you encounter them, it takes a pursuit to go for at least 8 minutes before roadblocks start spawning, which is far too long, they regularly crash into traffic, barriers, lane splitters and each other while you're driving in a straight line, not even trying to make them crash and as far as I can tell, there's only two different cop cars and the only difference is the Dodge Chargers are ever so slightly faster to accelerate towards you. There's no permanent heat increase on your vehicle per outing, so you're always starting a pursuit at heat 1 no matter when your last pursuit was, the same cop cars from a pursuit you were just in don't recognise your car when you just escaped them and the only reason to engage in the cops at all is for the Outlaw story missions. Which, without giving spoilers (not that anyone's gonna care about the spoilers for this game), isn't worth it beyond beating the game's story, especially as the majority of people aren't going to appreciate the real-life significance of the reward car nor it's previous owner.
Lastly, the live-action cutscenes they put in trying to give you some sense of nostalgia for the golden era of the franchise just don't land at all. The scenes are boring and bereft of personality and charm in directing, composition, lighting and post-production. When the actors aren't being bland and uninteresting, they're either poorly directed or were inexperienced at the time, like in the case of Fay Marsay (Amy), Christina Wolfe (Robyn) and Howard Charles (Manu), and I know this because I've seen them do way better in other roles, namely Fay in Star Wars: Andor.
Genuinely the only reason this one isn't 1 or 2 stars is because the visual customisation is decent and the game still looks phenomenal and is potentially worth saving via mods.
Unless you can pick this up for stupidly cheap in a sale or something and you don't mind tinkering with modding it, this game is not a good racing or drift game. But it is an extremely effective method of appreciating making screenshots.
