The most important part of the game, which is the handling is spot on, fantastic, mostly grip but some drift is good in some close corners, and some of the main mechanics like risk reward with money, the cops, coupled with the race requrements at the end of the week makes the first hours fantastic, i remember fucking up and getting caught on the second day of the first in-game week and loosing a ton of money and having to strategize how im going to upgrade the car, what races would i participate in, where i use my 2 available race restarts and being extremely tense when running the cops with a lot of money on hand.
Said that this game took me 30 hours to complete and basically the last 20 hours werent nearly as great and the last 10 were an obligation to finish the game, i didnt have a bad time since handling is fantastic, but all the difficulty wears off extremely quickly: while being in a slow car and inexperinced, having to deal with a level 5 heat is hard as balls and an achievent to make it out alive, with a fast car and understanding how the AI works, cops are just a chore; when you understand the best path to upgrade and buy cars, money transforms overtime from a strategy game to an acumulating pile of numbers like every AAA ever does, and in races, where I sweated and celebrated my first victory after the prologe since money was hard and you never had a fast car compared to your oponents, I ended up almost lapping A$AP Rocky in a 3 lap race to take his car in one of teh last races of the campaign, kinda like the Dark Souls 1 experience but in this game is waaaaaaaay worse, i played on the hardest difficulty btw.
Every game doesnt need to be extremely mechanically profound or anything like that, but if you main story is around 25 to 35 hours long to beat, as a designer, you cannot expect the player to have the same level of challenge if you havent made any single change to the game through it, in the original Most Wanted police heat levels werent all unlocked from the start so the high heats didnt have to be tuned down so you could escape in your Civic and you also didnt have as much time to learn how they work, level 6 heat only apears at the end of Most Wanted!, also with giving full map access at the start, 30 hours to learn how something works is a fuck ton of hours
I think i will come back to this game with a difficulty mod where requirements are higher, you have less days to meet those requirements or/and there arent races where you win cars
Said that this game took me 30 hours to complete and basically the last 20 hours werent nearly as great and the last 10 were an obligation to finish the game, i didnt have a bad time since handling is fantastic, but all the difficulty wears off extremely quickly: while being in a slow car and inexperinced, having to deal with a level 5 heat is hard as balls and an achievent to make it out alive, with a fast car and understanding how the AI works, cops are just a chore; when you understand the best path to upgrade and buy cars, money transforms overtime from a strategy game to an acumulating pile of numbers like every AAA ever does, and in races, where I sweated and celebrated my first victory after the prologe since money was hard and you never had a fast car compared to your oponents, I ended up almost lapping A$AP Rocky in a 3 lap race to take his car in one of teh last races of the campaign, kinda like the Dark Souls 1 experience but in this game is waaaaaaaay worse, i played on the hardest difficulty btw.
Every game doesnt need to be extremely mechanically profound or anything like that, but if you main story is around 25 to 35 hours long to beat, as a designer, you cannot expect the player to have the same level of challenge if you havent made any single change to the game through it, in the original Most Wanted police heat levels werent all unlocked from the start so the high heats didnt have to be tuned down so you could escape in your Civic and you also didnt have as much time to learn how they work, level 6 heat only apears at the end of Most Wanted!, also with giving full map access at the start, 30 hours to learn how something works is a fuck ton of hours
I think i will come back to this game with a difficulty mod where requirements are higher, you have less days to meet those requirements or/and there arent races where you win cars