Need for Speed Rivals review: speed demons

Need for Speed Rivals, EA’s latest big racing game from Swedish developer Ghost Games, wasn’t really on my radar until I ran across its giant booth at TGS this year. I had played (and liked) the original Hot Pursuit when it came out in 1998, but when Grand Theft Auto 3 came out a few years later and I realized my vehicular mayhem could happen in an open world, I didn’t really look back. But the racing genre has developed quite a bit since 1998, so Rivals could be an opportune moment for me to dive back into the Need for Speed series.

I played the game on PC, although it’s also available for basically any console you might own. Because it’s an EA game, it isn’t available on Steam, so if you want a digital copy you’re going to need to buy it from the Origin store. But is it actually worth your money?

Gameplay: great, except when it’s horrible

Rivals is a difficult game to review, because its fundamental gameplay is incredibly solid, but it is occasionally ruined by bugs and a very silly overarching design decision.

Let’s talk about that design decision first. Rivals is an open-world, always-online game. Playing as either a racer or a cop, you zoom around the scenic vistas of Redview County along with a few other real-life players and a lot of NPCs. There’s no real distinction between multiplayer or single-player modes; you can choose one or the other simply by seeking out either NPCs or real players to race with. Here’s a video of me driving around the world; you’ll notice I come across another real player (green) and a bunch of computer-controlled bots as well:

The problem, though, is that you can’t play the game offline even if you want to (as far as I could tell, anyway). And incredibly, there somehow don’t appear to be dedicated servers for it. This effectively means that you’re subject to the annoyances of multiplayer games (like lag, disconnections, and long pauses for server migration) even when you’re only trying to race against computer-controlled characters. It’s hard to put into words just exactly how frustrating this is, but it definitely cost me several races because the connection drops are often preceded by 10-20 seconds where you lose control of your car but your NPC opponents can continue.

Thankfully, I only had those sorts of issues a few times, but if you’re living in an area where there aren’t likely to be many other Rivals players, you’ll probably be in for a much worse time, because your games — even if you just want to race against the bots — are going to be hosted some some random player who’s nowhere near you.

The decision to make the game always-online is made even more frustrating by the fact that, if my experience was any indication, it’s not all that easy to actually play against other humans. There aren’t many, and you’ve got to track them down by driving around, even as they’re also driving around at speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour, and try to get close enough to challenge them (or chase them, if you’re playing as a cop).

The fact is that Need for Speed Rivals is probably 90 percent a single player game, but it lacks the simple and obvious conveniences single player games have (like a pause feature) because it’s always online. I’m not sure whether the always-online approach was an EA-mandated anti-piracy move or simply a design decision, but I’m inclined to guess the former because as a design decision it makes almost no sense.