Need For Speed: Heat review: High stakes in Palm City

Take to the streets to break the bank and earn street cred in the latest iteration of the NFS franchise, packed with places to see, rubber to burn, and cops to outrun.

Title: Need For Speed: Heat
Developer: Ghost Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (version reviewed), Xbox One, Windows
Release date: November 8, 2019

I feel that the NFS franchise started to experience a fall from grace because nothing seemed to come close to being as great as Most Wanted. The closest best installment we had in recent times was Rivals in 2013, but I am happy to say that it is dethroned this year by Need for Speed: Heat. This game is the pick-me-up the franchise needed after some prior disappointing and forgetful releases of this console generation.

The story is set in Palm City— a sizable open world with different locales taking inspiration from the likes of Miami, Florida. Motorsports are such a cultural phenomenon, generating a ton of buzz in the news. However, when night falls it becomes something far more dangerous and a huge task at hand for the police to get involved with. Illicit street racing is at an all-time high, prompting the Palm City Police to form a task force specifically to crack down on such.

During your playthrough, you drive in the day and partake in sanctioned races to earn money. At night, you can participate in street races. That is where you put yourself on the map an earn Rep. This Rep is synonymous with experience points and leveling up your profile. The more you earn, the more you level up; higher Rep levels give you access to new vehicles and parts for purchase.

After a brief overview of the story, you’re thrown right into a high-intensity street race in a tricked out Polestar. You’re already reaching speeds over 100 mph touring around the different parts of the map. There is traffic to look out for while you’re barreling through the city at breakneck speeds. This is an arcade-style racing game, so you can crash into other vehicles and walls and not have any negative impact on your car’s performance.

Throughout this first race, the game gives you the basics like which button is for the gas and brakes, how to use the nitrous, and how to properly turn. It’s easy enough to ignore the indicators, but its nice that it subtly presents that for perhaps the inexperienced players. The controls are very tight with options to tune them to your own liking. They respond just as intended.

There is no penalty for driving on the wrong side of the road or going off-road or knocking out a few fences and street signs here and there— that is until the cops come in. You’re trying to obtain the highest place in your race and now you have an externality that tries to weigh you down and lock you up. This shows just how fun and intense the racing can be in NFS: Heat. This is only the night time aspect of the game.

In the day time you can still drive recklessly and all that, but things are much tamer. Cops can still pursue you, but they are much more passive. You’d actually have to nearly miss them or bump their car to start a chase. Other than that, you can cruise around and participate in the aforementioned sanctioned events named Speedhunters Showdown (a bit corny for my tastes).

These are the more conventional circuit races where an area is closed off for the event. There is no traffic to worry about running into or cops trying to use PIT maneuvers to stop you. It’s just standard racing with prize earnings.

Need for Speed: Heat starts off very strong with the intro sequence. As tradition, when you finally choose your first car, you pick a car that really isn’t much to brag about. You complete your first few events with it. The early levels aren’t too much of a grind. You can gain a hefty sum of money rather quickly which allows you to either buy a bit of a more powerful vehicle or tune up your first car. Don’t even think about hypercars or tuners until you’re further down the story and have higher Rep levels. You have to start off with your typical hatchbacks and sedans.

For the most part, progression seems fine except for the fact that you can massively over-level yourself past what the story levels recommend. Each vehicle has a rating to them. The ratings are determined by things like max speed, acceleration, turbo, horsepower, torque, and such. The better these stats, the higher the vehicle rating. Starting ratings are somewhere in the early 100s.

As you can see on the map prior to events, they will have a rating which is a good indicator of difficulty and how your car will fare against the competition. If your vehicle’s rating is close enough to the number by a few tens, it should be a fair event. These numbers are also a good indicator to show what your competition will be like. Somewhere in the mid 200s is where you’ll start to see muscle cars and some tuners. In the 300s and above, you’ll start seeing some Lambos and Ferraris and Porsches.

Pretty early in the game, I had my eyes set on a Lotus. I then had to grind enough money in the day and Rep at night to obtain it and upgrade it. It did trivialize a few story events on the way because it had stats that were massively above the ratings of the other racers. But that’s the thing. You can almost forget the story and grind your levels as high as you want without any kind of soft cap.

Plus at every Rep level, the game gives you a set of day and night challenges to complete respectively. Some of them are simple; “Win in 2 to 3 [number]+ rating races” or “slipstream behind other races for 7 seconds consecutively.” The payouts are usually in Rep or money, incentivizing you to really complete them. By then, you would have probably leveled up again, refreshing these challenges and giving higher payouts. I reached a point where my car rating was at 300 and events were at 200.

Need for Speed: Heat works on a pseudo-day-and-night cycle. The garage is your hub and from there, you can choose whether you want to drive in the day or night. In the daytime, you can utilize fast travel to other safe houses if you want to get to specific areas quicker. However, at night, you aren’t allowed to fast travel. As long as you’re out of the garage, you can drive to your heart’s content. I’d actually encourage players to do that as long as there has been significant progress in the story.

Driving at night is much riskier, but not without its benefits. While cops are more passive in the daytime, at night they are relentless; but, that’s the point. The smallest transgressions will start a pursuit. This can even happen in the middle of a race, making things much harder. Even when you finish a race in the middle of a pursuit, they will continue on chasing you.

With each activity and interaction you have with the police, you start to gain Rep that you have to bank in at a safe house. However, you can’t go into a safe house or garage until you’re no longer being pursued. You also can’t start any new races or trials until they’re shaken off.

The longer the pursuit goes on and the more bonuses you get raises the Heat meter. It levels up from 0 to 5 per night. As the level goes higher, the cops and their tactics get harder. It’s just a simple chase from Heat levels 0 to 2, with the cops starting to match you in speed and prowess around level 2. They’re fairly easy as long as you are somewhat competent in handling your car and not coming to a complete halt. There is a dramatic difficulty spike once you hit Heat 3 and above. The Palm City PD will start to dispatch faster units, lay roadblocks and tire spikes, deploy rhinos, and even try to use kill switches.

It’s not just the cops you have to worry about. Your ride has a meter to determine how much damage it can take before it gets totaled. The cop cars will periodically ram you to slow you down, and in doing so can do some damage on you rather quickly.

There is an option that comes up to bribe the cops. As you’re in a pursuit and have a decent amount in your bank, you can cough up some money so they’ll “lose track” of you. But that is only a temporary band-aid until you come into contact with more police units.

I like the intensity and high stakes at hand. You have to prove your lawlessness to its limits and do anything you can to get them off your hide. It changes the dynamic between night and day dramatically, but the current state of the police difficulty is just a tad bit too unfair. I get that there is supposed to be a great risk in provoking prolonged police chases and wiping a few units out on the way, but sometimes you can drive perfectly and even drive through oncoming traffic seamlessly and still be in deep trouble.

They have to tone down the precision of the AI or make cop cars slightly easier to deflect because right now, anything at Heat 3 and above is basically a death sentence. The only viable way of ending pursuits is by heading to the downtown areas with jump cuts and use those. The AI usually tends to bug out and stop at ramps near water. Other areas don’t have them and I usually ended up getting busted and losing most of my Rep earnings of that night.

Each heat level is a multiplicative bonus to your current Rep earnings on hand. Say you gained 5,000 rep for a night and had a Heat multiplier of 2. You now get 10,000 added to your overall rank. Ideally, you’d want to have the highest multiplier you can get to level up, but it can easily be lost with one bad turn. Once your car is totaled or you get arrested, you lose not only most of the potential Rep you gained that night but also a sizable fraction of your current earnings in your bank.

When it comes to car customization, this game completely blows the past few Need for Speed titles into complete obscurity. First of all, there are (as of reviewing this) 127 cars in the game. You can even buy pickup trucks and SUVs which are better for offroading. There is a good amount of variety though the more high-end cars are mostly your typical Italian, French, and German hypercars.

Each car you buy has a different customization rating on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being barely customizable to 10 having much more to deal with. The aforementioned Polestar showcased just how far you can go customizing your vehicle. The normal model of it doesn’t have all these decals or the large spoiler and modified fenders and all that.

It’s not just a new coat of paint or a fancy decal. You can purchase different parts to modify your car to your liking, obviously with the higher customization ratings in mind. This is so integral to standing out because this game likes to showcase your ride whenever it can, even on idle screens.

There’s even an app that you can link your EA account to where you can customize vehicles. Say there’s a car you have your eyes on but can’t buy yet because your funds are low or you haven’t met the conditions to unlock it. Through the app, you can find that car and customize the body, color, and add any decals if you wish to. Upon completion, you can access that through the Studio option in your garage and download it. Of course, you’ll have to spend your money based on the parts used (not microtransaction money).

Beyond cosmetics, you can customize your car’s performance. You can tune them accordingly for more speed, turn, or other neat things like drifting and offroading. I’m personally not a fan of drifting in these kinds of games because I’m absolutely horrible at it, but the game does present the options to do so, along with a handful of events that require drift-oriented vehicles. NFS: Heat does not go as in-depth as driving simulation games do, so it’s easier to understand how to customize how your vehicles perform.

This game also gives you 12 preset character avatars to choose from. Upon confirmation, you can change their outfit and hairstyle. Unfortunately, skin color and facial features aren’t available.

Need for Speed: Heat does justice to the car models. The nice finish, gloss, and details are gorgeous. They aren’t on par with simulation games like current Forza or Gran Turismo games, but they are still solid. The weather, scenery, and lighting in Palm City are the more gorgeous parts though. Screw the fast travel. I don’t mind taking longer to get to my next objective. The scenery is nice to look at, given that it goes from a coastal area that stretches into urban and suburban areas. The night time is even more aesthetically pleasing, especially when it starts raining.

Much of this game’s playing field is inspired by Miami. The two main protagonists (excluding you) of the game are Cuban. They periodically throw in some Spanish in their dialogue. Since the story does revolve around them, the soundtrack has some very notable Latin inspiration.

It’s a good mix of hip-hop and EDM. You have big names in this playlist like Denzel Curry, Diplo, Logic, Toro y Moi, Machine Gun Kelly, and so many more artists. The only downside of this is that each song is played during certain events. The songs that go harder are the ones that play at night and the lighter-hearted upbeat and chill music play in the day. Some songs only play during races in the respective times of day too. This is why I prefer playing in the night time; the songs are better than the daytime selections.

The lightning in the night time, especially during races, adds more immersion to the overall atmosphere of the game. The neon pink and blue lights for track indicators meshes well with everything else. It truly is an underground street racing experience.

Upon starting the game, you are assigned a crew. It’s the equivalent of a guild in an RPG game. Doing any activity that grants you Rep is added to the communal Crew level. It’s a group effort to get the highest level to get that sweet Ferrari FXX. Every 5 levels grants active crew bonuses like a percentage based multiplier to money and Rep earned.

You can also choose to play this game’s world online or offline. Online lobbies hold up to 16 people, allowing you to invite other players in your lobby to a race. There is also the choice to play in a private lobby with friends. I’m glad to see that this doesn’t force an always online instance on those who want no interruptions.

Since the game has a social aspect to it, you can actually take in-game screenshots and share them via the snapshots option in the social tab. You can see how many likes they get just as you would in actual social media.

This game has a lot of content besides the racing and story. There are collectibles and challenges to complete scattered around Palm City, giving you more to do on your way to whatever event you’re getting to. It also familiarizes you with navigation, a handy thing when it comes to cop chases.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.