Game Review: Need for Speed (2015)

Need for Speed is an upcoming open world racing video game developed by Ghost Games and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is set to be released on November 3, 2015. It is the twenty-first major installment in the long-running Need for Speed series, and a full reboot of the franchise. It will mark the second eighth generation installment and it will be the first time a game in the main series will be released as an eighth-generation console exclusive.

With the 2015 approach to the series, simply titled Need for Speed, developer Ghost Games has found an interesting solution to solidifying the disparate goals the series has raced after in its lifetime. Instead of forcing players to drive one way or another, it's going to let you make the choice. "We're going deeper into customization than we ever have before," says Marcus Nilsson, general manager of Ghost Games. "If you want to be grippy, make it grippy. If you want to have it drifty, make it drifty. You can even set up your different cars with different handling styles." This handling choice is presented elegantly enough in the game as a part of the car customization menu. You can tweak individual, granular parts of the handling setup, or you can just pick a spot on a single bar, with one end representing a more sim-style "grip" system and one representing a more arcade-y "drift" system. This choice is a pretty big change for the series, and Nilsson says it was not exactly simple to implement. "It might sound easy to people, but physics systems are complicated," he says. "Even if it's an action racer like Need for Speed, there's still a really sophisticated racing engine underneath it. The game needs to be tickled a certain way to be an action racer and tickled a certain way to be grippy. We now have a layer where we can kind of define that."

 On 3 August 2015, Ekstrak who contributed to the soundtrack for Need for Speed: Carbon confirmed on his YouTube channel that at least two of his songs from Carbon will appear in Need for Speed as well as an early version of "Hard Drivers" called "Porsches". More information coming soon.