Since this was half price on the PS Store, i decided to finally buy it.
I've played for 3 nights now and have some initial comments I'd like to share to see if they are the general consensus or if I just need to step my game up/am looking at things the wrong way.
I picked the Mustang as my starter car, normally I don't go with the muscle car option but I felt like everyone else would pick the M3 and the Nissan so wanted something a bit different. I'm happy I picked it because it sounds amazing and has so far served me well.
In terms of physics, I do feel there has been an improvement over the previous games but still the grip handling could be improved. I find that initiating a drift still gets the car to turn in a bit faster then driving normally, so I find myself initiating drifts especially for the sharper corners just to reduce the amount of braking I have to do. Maybe I need to be equipping different parts to fix this, I haven't quite figured out how all the different parts affect the car yet.
On the flip side, with the limited drifting events that I've done, what is going on with the drifting? Maybe its the RX7 that I'm using not being good for drifting but the car snap oversteers on entry most of the time, then doesn't have enough torque to hold the massive angle it snapped into. Again maybe I'm using the wrong parts here but I feel like the parts labelled drift should be good for drifting. The car at times is so uncontrollably slidey that I've refused to take it out at night because any police chase would be inescapable.
That leads me onto my next point which is the police. With lower level cars, the police are incredibly difficult to escape. You simply lack the speed to be able to avoid getting rammed constantly or to escape without them immediately catching up. I'm aware that certain jumps will stop the cops from following, but when you're new to the game, map knowledge isn't great, so you quickly find yourself no where near a jump and before you know it, busted. I do enjoy that police chases can last more than 3 seconds now, but they should really scale to the car you're driving. I've read a few times that they get easier with a faster car which may be "realistic" but for a low level new player it is certainly more frustrating than fun.
Speaking of frustrating things, why would you want to play online, when the servers are shutting down every what seems like 30 minutes. It almost seems pointless when you have to quit back to the lobby and join again, why wouldn't you just play solo so you don't have to deal with that. On top of this, when the server shut down warning appears, it stays there no matter what you're doing. Trying to take a photo, now you've got server shut down message in the photo. Just really don't understand why that needs to be there in the photo, the rest of the gameplay i can understand, but when I'm taking a photo I expect there to be a clean, "hudless" image.
For some positives, I really like the visuals of the map, there are plenty of locations clearly intended for photos and the neon lights everywhere give the game a nice vibe. As has been stated by others, the traffic is a bit on the low side sometimes, and can leave the city feeling a bit deserted, but once you're in a race or a cop chase, you quickly forget about that. As for map/road design, I'm still exploring but I'm enjoying it so far, each area has its own vibe and can be distinguished from the other areas. Having a beach to drive on is also pretty neat. Customisation is a gradual improvement from the previous games with a few more parts and less restrictions which is nice.
I am having fun with the game so far, but as with every need for speed recently, there have been a few features of the game that need some adjusting.
