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The Need for Speed franchise heads back to the nights. EA was able to capitalize on the street racing craze with Need for Speed Underground and its sequel and intelligently reintroduced some classic Need for Speed elements in Most Wanted. Carbon is the sequel to last year’s game but it is closer to the Underground games with more emphasis on night races, drifting, and team racing.
Carbon’s story is actually a direct sequel to Most Wanted. At the end of that game, your character moved to the top of the underground racing circuit and left Rockport after he had gained his reputation. In Carbon, the character has moved to Palmont City to escape a cop on your tail. The cop became a bounty hunter in the process and is looking for you. Thankfully one of your friends steps in and rescues you, but you need make your racing skills useful and make some cash. While it’s a little weird to have a story in a racing game, it works well in Carbon, playing like a Fast and the Furious sequel. The story is once again told by real actors in CG environments.
In Carbon, you’ll be tasked with taking over the city by winning races and getting turf. Palmont City has for main crews each with their own section of the city. You can take over a zone by winning two races in that turf. Once you take over all of the turfs in a territory you face off with the crew head for a chance at the entire territory. Don’t think that once you get a territory it’s yours forever though. The crews will be back to reclaim what they think is theirs. Carbon introduces some new gameplay mechanics to the Need for Speed formula. One of the most notable is the ability to have a wingman with you in your races. They can be scouts (find shortcuts), drafters (give you a speed boost at times), and blockers (which block other cars from overtaking you). The mechanic works pretty well and there are times when you rely on your wingman to win a race. Other times they are less useful but never become a problem for you.
The game has many types of races. Aside from the expected stuff like lap races, point-to-point races, and checkpoint races, you’ll find drift races (where you gain points by drifting often and cleanly), speedtrap races (where speed markers note your speed at specific places in the race and then these markers are added up, the higher the score the better), and canyon races, which are the boss races. In canyon races, you are chasing the boss up a canyon trying to get as close as possible. You gain points by staying closer and a multiplier by staying really close. The second part of the canyon race has you running down the canyon with the boss chasing you. The points you gained going up are drained the closer the boss gets to you. The game does make some use of car chases but it isn’t anywhere near as intense as it was in Most Carbon. This is a bit disappointing since those races were extremely fun and the new drift races really are not.
Carbon has plenty of cars divided into three main groups: exotics, muscles and tuners. The exotics include cars like Lamborghini, Porsche, and Mercedes, the muscles include cars like the Chevy Camaro and the tuners include cars like the Toyota Supra and Nissan Skyline. As before, you’ll win cars from the crew leaders or you can purchase them. You can also purchase performance and cosmetic upgrades. New this year is an autoscult system that lets you really tweak the actual body of the car. It’s a cool feature and it leads to some unique cars.
Need for Speed Carbon on Xbox 360 provides full eight-player multiplayer via Xbox Live. The game includes all of the race types found in the single-player game as well as unique modes involving the cops. The game rewards you for playing online by giving you experience points and allowing you to unlock additional cars. Aside from the multiplayer the game includes replay value by letting you take on several dozen challenge races and also includes a quick race hour. The actual single-player campaign can last anywhere from 8 or so hours to over 20 if you really want to complete everything.
The game’s graphics are pretty good since it uses a modified version of the engine that ran Most Wanted. Like the Underground games, Carbon is plays entirely at night which hides some of the fancier texture work and such but the city nonetheless looks great. The car models are very detailed. They even look interesting thanks to the autosculpt feature. The audio is also good. The game includes both licensed and original music. The licensed music includes hip-hop and rock as expected. The sound effects sound a lot like last year’s game which is okay since it sounds great.
It’s a shame that EA decided to drop the intense cop chases from Most Wanted. Carbon is still a very addicting game even though the drift races don’t work quite as well as they should. The canyon races can get passionate at times and the underlying racing is as solid as ever.
-- Jose Liz & -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Nov 16, 2006
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