Need for Speed Rivals (Xbox One)
The thrill of street racing doesn’t just come from the breakneck speed and danger. That excitement is elevated even further by the fact it is taboo. Racing down roads that were never meant for such high speeds, weaving through traffic comprised of people unaware they were to be a part of this competition, and flaunting that you feel you’re above the law fuels your adrenaline in Need for Speed Rivals, but you aren’t limited to just being the outlaw racers. Two equal stories you can swap between at most any time let you play as law enforcement or a street racer, and by playing both sides of this battle for the road, you can see how they both start to corrupt each other.
The two tales told in Need for Speed Rivals intertwine and share certain events, the start of each chapter introducing the evolution of how police and street racers interact on the roads in Redview County. Initially things begin as expected, the cops trying to foil the fun of street racers who are putting peoples’ lives at risk with their unsanctioned racing, but over the course of the story both sides become increasingly frustrated with each other and bold in their answers to the opposition. Racers start to goad cops deliberately and so the police officers become more violent in trying to knock drivers off the road. Even when the cops are cracked down on for taking things too far, the racers see this as a chance to push their luck, making a show of attacking the cowed police. While there are few real characters in the story, the faceless police officer or racer you end up playing as is given time to espouse their philosophy amidst the crucial turns in the narrative, a building tale of obsession and delusion making it clear why things keep escalating. One side feels the battle against racers is vital to avoiding people losing faith in the law while the other rankles under the idea of limitations entirely. It is a destructive rivalry no doubt, and while its guiding hand on the game’s events isn’t too strong, it does contextualize the two story mode options in an interesting way that makes neither side really feel heroic and appropriately so due to the actions you’ll undertake to complete them.
Need for Speed Rivals has a large open area to drive through as you please, Redview County free to explore in your vehicle and home to many different biomes to race through. Highways in the desert allow you to build up insane speed unopposed, but the heavy forested area constantly threatens you with abundant foliage to crash into. Curvy seaside roads make driving in a cluster perilous and areas under construction can lead to roads terminating or featuring unusual shortcuts to take. The whole map is available from the start, but story missions only start to become available in places like the snowy mountains later, meaning while some roads become intimately familiar, the cop and racer stories can both be played through without it feeling like the setting for the action is too limited in scope.
The high speed racing in Need for Speed Rivals is easy to quickly adapt to. You’ll need to know what times to hit the brakes to kick off a drift around a corner and get a feel for when your vehicle can take it without letting up on the gas. Even though cars range in how easy they are to control, the controls for driving will quickly become second nature so you can make some satisfyingly tight turns and keep your speed even on the winding roads some regions of the map feature. Driving talent will be honed in time, but you can also impact your effectiveness with a replenishing nitrous boost if you need to push up your speed or recover from a collision. You can get wrecked completely in Need for Speed Rivals, any event you’re participating in ending if you are, but a crash isn’t necessarily a death sentence. High speed collisions will wrest control away from you as you watch your vehicle reel from the impact, the game abandoning realism for a bit to really let the car tumble and fly, and while it’s satisfying to watch, a longer wreck is also worse to experience. You will be allowed to get back into the action with some damage to your durability, but you’ll need to get back up to speed after so any delay can make certain events harder to complete. Regardless, going at incredible speeds can be quite exhilarating and testing your luck is often encouraged, so this middle ground between being able to show the damage and not ruining your chances at success still feels like it landed at the right sweet spot.
One other element that impacts the action is the Pursuit Tech system. A car can have two types of Pursuit Tech at a time, these often serving as weapons meant to impede or even outright destroy other cars. The Electromagnetic Pulse lets you lock onto a racer ahead of you and send a surge of electricity into them if you can maintain it, the Shockwave sends a burst of force out from your car in all directions, and a Spike Strip can be laid so any car that hits it will struggle to maintain control with their popped tires. Certain Pursuit Tech is unique to one side of the conflict, cops able to call in a Helicopter to lay spike strips along the road further ahead or call in a Roadblock, but these all can be extremely helpful in turning the tables if used well and give you more to think about than good driving. Naturally you can also ram other cars, but there are Pursuit Tech options that are good counters to that or even outright cancel out others if used, and while you start off with a few uses per equipped weapon, they do diminish unless you pull into a repair shop. Luckily, the repair shop is more like a high speed pit stop, the player only needing to head under its awning for a full recovery and weapon refill, but it does add a wrinkle to the longer events as the aggressive racing on offer means you’ll likely need to make time to swoop in or risk failing due to building injuries.
The cop and racer careers don’t actually lock you into specific events, the player given a good degree of freedom on how they choose to approach them. Instead, each step in a story is tied to a set of goals. Racers are presented with a group of three SpeedLists, also known as Assignments when playing as a police officer, the player choosing which one they think suits them best for that story portion. In some ways, it almost serves as a malleable form of difficulty selection, the player even able to swap out their current list for one of the other two if it proves to be too difficult. These can contain goals like wrecking other cars, achieving certain speed goals, utilizing specific Pursuit Tech effectively, or participating in the events around the county. These have specific starting spots and can award a bronze, silver, or gold award based on how well you perform, and this makes up most of the game’s truly structured content. With set endpoints and clear goals like participating in races or arresting racers, these come with wide range of difficulty and the story will gradually encourage you to play harder events or earn the higher awards when clearing them. These missions are technically different across the two stories, but not all that much. The Time Trial for racers, for example, is just about getting to the finish line quickly enough, but the police have a version called Rapid Response where you need to reach the destination but also get time penalties if you collide with anything along the way. Interceptor missions can involve a single police officer trying to catch up and arrest a racer by wrecking their vehicle while the racer version instead has you trying to outrun them to lose their trail… although it’s probably wiser to just wreck the cop. Hot Pursuit is likely the most interesting race type, the cop version involving you need to bust every street racer competing against each other while as a racer you’d instead need to win the race while avoiding police aggression. Smart use of PursuitTech ends up just as key as strong driving for clearing the more demanding events, but admittedly the range in design for these events does feel a bit small, most just a race with a few complications often arising from an increased combat focus.
Police and racers do feel different in quite a few ways though. Both sides unlock vehicles over the course of the stories, real life brands that often look rather sleek feeling like strong rewards, but cops will receive them for free while the racer must spend point to buy them. Cop cars, even undercover ones, all are less open to visual customization despite having higher base stats though, but both side can upgrade a car’s abilities and Pursuit Tech some. A cop can restart events with impunity much of the time, but racers would have to shake any law enforcement tailing them before the option arises. Racers can challenge other cars to spontaneous head to head races, but cops can instead spark a chase when they spot a racer’s car. The racer story can be thought of as the harder one because of their stronger restrictions and they even have one of the bigger penalties in place as well. While out driving you can earn Speed Points through certain risky actions like nearly missing a collision, drifting, and driving at high speed, although clearing events will earn you far more at one time. Speed Points are what you spend on upgrades, vehicles, and Pursuit Tech, but while a cop keeps every point they earn, if a racer is busted, they lose it all. A racer needs to return to their hideout periodically to bank it, a thematically appropriate risk-reward system baked in since they can also earn more points at once by building up a multiplier with more dangerous racing. The discrepancy in difficulty doesn’t mean being a racer feels like hard mode, but there are at least more tangible differences between the two than how their fairly similar events are framed conceptually.
One thing that definitely dampens some of the potential enjoyment of Need for Speed Rivals though is its implementation of online multiplayer. You can race in the same world as up to five other players, players able to race each other or cooperate at times, and since you’ll be on opposing sides in this game’s rivalry you can sometimes interfere with each other for Speed Point rewards. This online mode, known as AllDrive, can be opted out of should you desire, but it does even interfere in solo play. There is no way to pause the action when out driving because it would disrupt AllDrive, meaning you’ll be left vulnerable or need to forfeit an event if you need to step away. When playing online though, there are times the game will migrate servers, sometimes disregarding if you’re in the middle of an event and leading to some time lost despite some time-sensitive objectives. Disconnects can boot you as well, the game prioritizing the connectivity over your personal experience when it would be more welcoming to let you continue in a solo world momentarily if it was experiencing problems. As nifty as it can be to come across another human driver, the troubles with the system can often outweigh the brief benefits unless you’ve got a group of friends together to play.
THE VERDICT: Smooth driving, a well-realized premise, and an aggressive racing style bolstered by its Pursuit Tech system ensures Need for Speed Rivals isn’t lacking in satisfying and exhilarating action. A well-designed and varied road map hosts the action and the SpeedList/Assignment system is a smart way to let the player have some control over how they tackle the game’s two stories, the cop and racer both feeling distinct in how they tackle certain goals or engage with systems like vehicle upgrades and SpeedPoints. The events do feel like they could have benefited from greater variety and the online multiplayer is accommodated in poor ways, but the freedom to explore Redview County mixes well with the dangerous thrills this rivalry between cops and racers often leads to.
And so, I give Need for Speed Rivals for Xbox One…
A GREAT rating. The annoying disruptions this game’s approach to multiplayer causes and some overlap in the event design are unfortunate marks on Need for Speed Rivals, but its excellent driving controls and the way it handles its rivalry system help it still provide excitement and adrenaline throughout. Some hiccups like the racer version of Interceptor being incredibly easy if you just batter the cop with Pursuit Tech do hamper things a touch, but otherwise the ongoing battle between both sides can feel a little transformative. On the side of the racer you can start to feel the thrill in outfoxing the cops on your tail, flaunting your speediness and handle of the road over these single-minded cops trying to arrest you. On the law enforcement side though, you feel that shield of being on the right side of the law as you can crash into cars with impunity and hold onto your SpeedPoints regardless of how you do. The plot focusing in on the warping of the minds on both sides of the rivalry ensures they can escalate to more dangerous and demanding SpeedList and Assignments, and the game allowing you to pick your path is a smart way to avoid frustration. A few moments do have required tasks that are not too demanding and after clearing a story you can do the lists you left behind so you’re not denied content, and while there is room to grow in the event design, you’re still at least getting shakeups to standard racing that play appropriately into this game’s theming.
Player choice extends beyond just the garage in Need for Speed Rivals thanks to the Pursuit Tech system’s smart limitations and the way the story is structured, and SpeedPoints even ensure there’s room for action outside the plot so freedom to explore isn’t just a novelty. Driving is clean and quick to learn but still requires attentiveness before you even factor in the interesting complications that come from such a focus on aggression towards not just the other side of the rivalry but competing drivers. Street racing gets to shine since both sides have to contend with the same dangers and experiencing the same thrills no matter which side of the law they’re on, and by splitting the plot across two opposing drivers, Need for Speed Rivals provides two great flavors that make this racing game more than just a test to see how fast you can go.