Pros:
+ Excellent, even addictive core gameplay
+ All of the different types of cars look great and feel unique with all of their stats, hidden attributes and occasional special abilities
+ Expansive maps with lots of interesting roads and strategizing, including entire secret areas only accessible from certain sneaky passes
+ Big Surf Island, while feeling a bit separated from the main map, is an immaculate and enjoyable addition to the already huge world of Paradise City
+ Music selection is really great even if it’s on the older side of rock and punk (though it’s weird how only royalty-free classical music plays at night)
+ So many missions of different types to clear and collectibles to obtain, with Breath of the Wild’s Korok-like Billboards, Super Jumps and ”Smash” fences to drive through everywhere as well as countless achievements to get
+ Haven’t had the chance to try the online multiplayer on the remastered version but I can recall from the original on PS3 that local multiplayer was really fun
Cons:
- You support EA by buying the game (try not to think about it)
- Most likely related to the fact above, the absolute biggest issue with the game are the freezes/crashes. About 40-50% of the time the game will crash when you open up an ongoing session of play. On Switch this means putting the console on sleep mode while playing the game and later returning to play it again. The screen will freeze in the last moment you played, and the background noise will stack and loop indefinitely. Apparently this issue also exists on PC, where if you Alt+Tab or otherwise switch out from the game and try to come back the game will be frozen. Hopefully they fix this one day, but knowing EA they probably won’t.
- Usually the cars’ breaking physics are great, but sometimes it feels like you’ve barely scraped by another car at like 20 km/h and still get totally wrecked, TL;DR some specific cars are made out of styrofoam for no discernible reason
- If you want to cancel a mission while doing it, the only way to do so is to come to a complete stop in momentum and not pressing any buttons for 3 seconds. This may not sound so bad, but it can get real boring and annoying real fast if you’re grinding an especially tight time trial
- The toy cars and some other ones are missing proper breaking physics, so when you get Wrecked it just looks like your car stopped in front of a wall
- Graphics are great for their time, but feel a bit dated nowadays even though the remaster has done a solid job at maintaining their polish
- The online multiplayer may have some flaws that I will include here when I’ve played it sufficiently
+ Excellent, even addictive core gameplay
+ All of the different types of cars look great and feel unique with all of their stats, hidden attributes and occasional special abilities
+ Expansive maps with lots of interesting roads and strategizing, including entire secret areas only accessible from certain sneaky passes
+ Big Surf Island, while feeling a bit separated from the main map, is an immaculate and enjoyable addition to the already huge world of Paradise City
+ Music selection is really great even if it’s on the older side of rock and punk (though it’s weird how only royalty-free classical music plays at night)
+ So many missions of different types to clear and collectibles to obtain, with Breath of the Wild’s Korok-like Billboards, Super Jumps and ”Smash” fences to drive through everywhere as well as countless achievements to get
+ Haven’t had the chance to try the online multiplayer on the remastered version but I can recall from the original on PS3 that local multiplayer was really fun
Cons:
- You support EA by buying the game (try not to think about it)
- Most likely related to the fact above, the absolute biggest issue with the game are the freezes/crashes. About 40-50% of the time the game will crash when you open up an ongoing session of play. On Switch this means putting the console on sleep mode while playing the game and later returning to play it again. The screen will freeze in the last moment you played, and the background noise will stack and loop indefinitely. Apparently this issue also exists on PC, where if you Alt+Tab or otherwise switch out from the game and try to come back the game will be frozen. Hopefully they fix this one day, but knowing EA they probably won’t.
- Usually the cars’ breaking physics are great, but sometimes it feels like you’ve barely scraped by another car at like 20 km/h and still get totally wrecked, TL;DR some specific cars are made out of styrofoam for no discernible reason
- If you want to cancel a mission while doing it, the only way to do so is to come to a complete stop in momentum and not pressing any buttons for 3 seconds. This may not sound so bad, but it can get real boring and annoying real fast if you’re grinding an especially tight time trial
- The toy cars and some other ones are missing proper breaking physics, so when you get Wrecked it just looks like your car stopped in front of a wall
- Graphics are great for their time, but feel a bit dated nowadays even though the remaster has done a solid job at maintaining their polish
- The online multiplayer may have some flaws that I will include here when I’ve played it sufficiently