Review

Need for Speed Carbon

By Ouroboros
October 31, 2006 14:45 PM PST
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Own the Streets

PROTIP: Take a nice close look at your wreckless driving in the awesome photo mode.

New to the series is the concept of hiring a crew of talent that'll help you on the road and in the garage. Blockers take out troublesome adversaries in the middle of a race, drafters carve a path through the wind to help you reach new heights of speed, and scouts can show you every back-water time-saver in town. What's more, only by hiring particular help can you get access to certain customization options, like AutoSculpting spoilers or exhaust tips.

You'll need the help, because boroughs are broken into pieces of territory, each of which contains a number of events, including drifting competitions, time trials, sprints, circuits, and speed traps. Win races to defend your stomping grounds by driving to events or jumping there via the handy world map, take over another couple blocks, or just race goons you meet on the street to the finish line of your choice.

Take over an entire borough, and you'll battle skilled boss drivers in long city races and insanely dangerous downhill events in the canyon, followed by an awesome twenty-car "Race War" event. Between the blur of passing scenery, a plethora of racing events to tackle, the time-slowing speed-breaker ability, and a deadly-serious over-the-top storyline that'll give you the giggles, Carbon will suck you in even if you're not normally a racing fan.

Fill 'Er Up

PROTIP: Make sure you've got nitrous installed before taking on a twenty-car Race Wars event.

Multiplayer races come in ranked and unranked varieties, and you'll gain experience for your Internet exploits, presumably to help you gauge the relative prowess of the competition. The experience is awesome if everyone has an untroubled connection, but any lag at all has a tendency to juggle opponents all over the road, which makes the optional collision detection quite literally a hit-or-miss affair. More robust prediction code, like that of most modern first-person shooters, would've been nice, but most of the time the experience is still enormously gratifying.

As if the single-player campaign and multiplayer rankings weren't enough, there's plenty more to do: a large number of ancillary challenges unlock more goodies, and accomplishing particular tasks in the world wins you reward cards that expose still more content. Through it all, Carbon almost always manages to feel as finely tuned as any of its high performance sleds, and with downloadable content on the way, it seems safe to think that it'll be an adrenaline generating favorite for a good long while.