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@MedigoFlame, I turned to Heat because FH4 has finally become too much of a chore and not enough fun, I got it "free" with EA Play (which was less than £1 for the first month on Steam). I've played about 12 hours so far and I have some thoughts.
The good:
The racing is fine (once you've stopped your car feeling like a somehow drunk boat).
The cosmetic mod system is better than any other racing game I've played (even if a lot of the mods themselves are questionable).
The sense of car ownership is better than in any game since GT4 - my 180SX (my starter car) is currently my best one by some way thanks to a V6 swap, I had made it my drift car in favour of racing an RX7 then an NSX, but I've now swapped the RX7 and 180 back over again. I've bought loads of cars in the meantime but never actually use any of them...
The graphics are amazing, enough to make me want to pay attention to the background when I'm driving around the hills at night and the city is all lit up in the background, but I can't because I'd crash.
The bad:
Drifting. What were they thinking? I get that it's all about the car, but at the level I'm at right now none of my cars can actually drift even with a full drift tune, they just... Wobble. I can do a powerslide, yeah, maybe even string two powerslides together (as long as they're both in the same direction), but trying to actually hold a drift is impossible and each powerslide completely kills your momentum. I'm sure when I've got a 1,000bhp car it'll drift, but why is the game making me do drift events
now? Although I should point out I have no problem winning those events because through lots of tedious, slow powersliding and pinballing all over the place I can usually get the target score before the last lap starts. Drift cars are also impossible to drive normally, which has completely put me off doing drift events at night because if I get into a police chase in my RX7 I will get busted immediately because it'll just be flopping about all over the place like an idiot.
Speaking of which, police chases are maybe the least fun you can have in a videogame. If you can't outrun the first car quickly enough you will almost always end up busted or wrecked because they're impossible to shake through a combination of fast driving and evasive manoeuvres, they're far too hard to crash out unless you hit them head on or T-bone (although doing either takes a chunk out of your own health so you're only really going to do that if you're not already being chased by several cars) and they just suck.
The ugly:
Many of the cosmetic mods look like a Salvador Dali fever dream that no real human would
ever put on their car. As someone who occasionally browses Speedhunters I sometimes see the authors wondering if the bolt-on overfender trend is dead, and guess what the most ubiquitous mod you can get for basically every car is? Same as underlighting, didn't that die in the '00s? It just strikes me as odd that the Speedhunters name is plastered all over a game featuring cars that would never actually be seen on Speedhunters, yet you can't build the interesting stuff you see there.
Car unlocks seem weirdly paced, like they come in themed batches - level 22 unlocks almost all of the old European cars in one go, then two levels later you get all the '00s JDM nuggets. Why not mix it up so you get something for everyone at every level?
No pausing during online play means I just don't play online, but solo play doesn't have AI cars in free roam so you're left feeling like some sort of psychopathic hoon trashing an otherwise peaceful city which is somehow simultaneously hosting a Horizon-like motorsport festival (with zero evidence of that outside races) while facing a plague of illegal street racing that they can't solve even with unrealistically heavy-handed policing. Like, has no one living there raised their hand in a town hall meeting to say "Guys, I think the people doing the illegal street racing at night might be the ones doing the legal street racing during the day"?
The music, the sound of cars bouncing off the limiter, people making vague threats during night races, the repetitive phone calls every time you leave the garage and objective notifications get on my nerves. Also the post-race scenes where your driver does an awkward little shuffle then stand there even more awkwardly make me cringe so much, I thought FH4 was bad in this respect but Heat, trying and failing to be "edgy" as it is, is so much worse!
Also I'm not sure if it's just me, but some tuning components don't seem to differ - what do purple brakes/suspension/diffs do that blue ones don't? I find myself googling a fair bit about the game which suggests it's not very well explained nor intuitive.
Anyway, I had rock bottom expectations for Heat so despite my complaints I am enjoying it, I'm just glad I didn't pay for it and I won't be subscribing to EA Play to keep playing it after this month is up. It has however distracted me from Jedi: Fallen Order which is pretty much the entire reason I subbed in the first place.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.