Need for Speed Carbon Review - IGN (2025)

The Career mode follows last year's trippy FMV-based narrative. Because of the addition of crews or because EA wanted to go even heavier into its presentation (which it often does at the expense of improving gameplay), the game is filled with cutscenes and pasty, well-coiffed well-dressed gearheads. Last year's game was basic. Razor was your enemy, he was a first-class dick, and he rigged your car. You had to seek revenge and it felt good because he was a no-good bully. This year's narrative is watered down, with more forced mystery behind a rather simple premise. The novelty of the specialized FMV cutscenes is still moderately entertaining, but because of EA's excesses it comes across as strained, and there are simply too many dudes with perfect eyebrows and mullets for my tastes. Clearly Emmanuelle Vaugier needs a little more direction and some more meat to reach her potential. Meanwhile Josie Maran had far more fun and showed far more skin in her role in Most Wanted.

Progress
To be honest, Carbon's storyline is about as generic as possible, but it still manages to work to a certain extent. You start off as a nobody who once had it all but lost it, and you must start all over again. You begin by choosing a car class. Since I've played this series for like eight years now, to experience NFS in a different light I choose a muscle car, a Camaro SS. Muscle cars tend to be classic American cars, thus they have big, fat V8s, they drive like dragsters with great acceleration and top speeds. But they handle like merde. No difference here, at least at first. If you decide the first car you chose was a bad decision, win races and beat bosses, and you'll earn money to buy new cars. Or, like last year, after you beat a boss you can pick from a set of random cards, one of which is the boss's pink slip.

There are 40-plus cars to earn or unlock. Other muscle cars include the new Mustang GT, the Dodge Charger SRT8, and the old Dodge Charger RT. While we're on the subject, the tuners feature the Mazda Speed3, RX-7, RX-8, Eclipse GT, and Lotus Elise for starters. The tuners comprise the Alpha Brera and Mercedes CLK 500, and a variety of Porsches.

Each territory is made of a number of sections. In each section you'll see about three to four races. You'll need to win each race to win a section and, from there, move in on a full territory. Each territory is controlled by another gang, overseen by their leader, who visits you from time to time as you creep into their space. While fighting for territory, a rival gang may challenge you to a section you own. There are two choices, accept the challenge or reject it. If you race and win, it's yours. If you lose, you can always re-try. Once you take over a full territory the boss appears and challenges you. You'll race once against the boss, and then take it to Carbon Canyon for a two-leg race.

The two-part race takes place on steep narrow canyon roads built with huge S-turns and pliable railings that give way to spectacular deaths if you mess up. The first race involves following the boss as closely as possible. Your score is based on your proximity. In the second race he follows you. Whoever gets the high score wins, as long as nobody has driven off the canyon walls beforehand. Honestly, the first city race is usually harder than the canyon races, and in at least two of the canyon races I was able to surge ahead of the boss in the first race, maintain the lead of about five seconds, and beat him in a single route. The boss races in Most Wanted were tougher and more complicated and thus more fun. These are different, but the final outcome is that the experience is just OK. It's like a sideways move. These boss races are different than before, but like Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, there is no there there. Plus, there are only four boss races, whereas in Most Wanted there were 15.

But the addition of a crew is another sideways move. The triple-headed crew actually brings in more problems than benefits to Carbon. Crew members regularly will get in your way; they'll slow you down and perhaps even ruin a real chance of winning. They also win races for you. For some people that might be a benefit. For me, I just felt like my experience was tampered with. The crew is also always talking to you. It's like Midna in Twilight Princess, except instead it's some mullet-headed fat dude. You'll eventually get as many as six different members available for hire, but in the end I prefer not having them at all.

In familiar fashion, individual parts or pre-made full-body kits can be purchased. The suite of choices is solid, though it appears fewer engine performance options and upgrades are allowed than in Underground 2. The new AutoSculpt option, however, makes up for that in part. Once you hire a scout, you're enabled the option of sculpting your modified parts to new heights. Spoilers, bumpers, skirts, hoods, you name it, you can tweak them all using a series of sliders. Admittedly, the effect is purely visual. But hey, it's fun! And, when you're done tweaking the car (at least for Xbox 360), you can take it online and show it off.

Real Muscle
EA's decision to take advantage of Ford's newly remade Mustang and Dodge Charger is both opportunistic and smart. Along with the online options, the addition of muscle cars is the biggest single change the series has seen in core gameplay in years. The muscle cars drive differently than any other car in the series and they affect the series in a central way.

In Underground 2 EA tried to incorporate SUVs but with little success. The muscles are different. These cars rock. They have huge up-front power and great top speeds. And, true to life, they handle like crap. But hey, everyone liked Starsky and Hutch, right? I mean look at Driver the game. It's built on sliding '70s hot rods. Still, EA has designed the muscle cars and the courses to work together and better than in almost any other racer. Driving them is more like driving a rally car on 100% pavement all the time. You have to start early and slide into each turn. The real reward is modifying these beasts as you progress. The upgrades tighten the handling and cornering. The top speeds and acceleration increase even further. And the ride is totally different than driving either the tuners or the exotics. Try driving a muscle and then switch to the tuners, and you'll see the difference right away.

EA designed drift races to function so that emphasis is placed on skill and combos. Each player must achieve the top score against his rivals. The best combos are created by attaining the highest possible speed, keeping your car in the yellow paint (next to the walls) for as long as possible, and linking combos together. Do it in a tuner and then try a muscle car. It's quite a difference. Or try a tier three exotic. They're all completely distinct skill sets.

Brining it to Wii
Enough about the basics though. There's one thing Wii gamers want to know, and that's how the controller makes or breaks the Carbon experience. Despite our initial impressions, the final version actually has a solid feel, and we'd go as far as to say the actual steering control trumps analog input after just a few minutes of practice. Included on Carbon Wii is the ability to play using either a single Wii-mote in the classic Excite Truck position, or team it up with a nunchuk controller for a more traditional analog experience. When using the Wii-mote exclusively, the control can be done by either tilting like in Tony Hawk, or by twisting like GT Pro Series or Monster 4X4. We had overall better luck with tilting the controller, but putting the Wii-mote into the Ubisoft racing wheel worked just fine as well. Included in Wii-mote control are three basic sensitivity choices, as well as "Oversteer" which essentially adds tighter steering on the fly by holding the A button during a race. If you chose the nunchuk control methods they revolve around turning the Wii-mote into an analog gas/break "stick", and while it works to a certain extent there's really no beating the classic Wii-mote control for Carbon.

The port does show a bit of laziness as well though, primarily when dealing with menu interface. The basic issue lies with the fact that in-game racing is done with the Wii-mote held in the classic position, though all the menus expect players to be holding the remote in a pointing motion towards the screen. Mind you the IR isn't used for anything, so it's based entirely around d-pad input. Where this gets annoying is during any menu navigation from pause menus, as players will have the controller held like an NES, pause the menu, and have to consciously turn it forward just to work menus. Would it really be too hard to change d-pad orientation when in a race so people aren't constantly flipping the thing around in their hands? Apparently so.

Another minor gripe in the interface lies in the fact that the IR input can't be used, while a few areas are simply perfect for it. When selecting races from the map, for instance, the d-pad or analog stick is used to steer an on-screen cursor around various hotspots. Of course we instantly saw the cursor and began waving our arms, but since there's no IR support we had to fall back on basic d-pad/analog control. It doesn't seem like a huge issue on paper, but any Wii veteran knows that once you've used cursor interface, you simply don't want to go back - especially when you're forced to control a cursor anyways, just not with the Wii pointer. Just odd.

Graphics and Sound
Though the control itself is pretty dang solid for Wii, the game takes a bit of a hit in the visual department. Since the game is essentially a port up from the GameCube version we weren't really expecting to see a huge leap graphically, as the game didn't have a ton of time to make Wii launch. What we weren't expecting, however, were annoying frame rate issues. For whatever reason, Need for Speed Carbon has some serious trouble locking down a solid scroll rate, and while it has a slightly better look than its GameCube counterpart the game doesn't play nearly as smooth. It never got to the point where the game was unplayable or downright hideous, but there is definitely a constant and noticeable choppy look to the game, and with a game that is covered with shadows and low-lighting areas the dropped frames really hurt visibility at times. Combining a sketchy frame rate with nighttime driving - maybe not the best move.

Despite the game's technical limitations, the overall style of Carbon is pretty slick, and in a few areas the limited razzle-dazzle on screen actually made for a better racing experience. On the 360, for example, there's an intentional blur and pull-back effect that happens when the cars begin to hit top speed. It is, of course, a matter of personal preference, but to a few of us the game actually felt a bit slower during these effects, as the camera would pull away, the screen would blur, and the overall sense of speed actually dropped a bit. On Wii, these effects didn't make the cut, but it actually serves to be a cleaner and more straight-forward racing experience. We prefer taking the first-person view and seeing absolutely no body of the car in the frame to get a full sense of speed, but in general the lack of overused blur was actually welcomed as we ripped through the already dimly lit streets. Obviously we want to see Wii pushed as far as possible graphically, but in this case Carbon's graphical shortcomings were a bit of a blessing within a curse.

On the sound side, Carbon takes the over-the-top sound from Most Wanted and gives it a kick in the pants. You'll hear greatly altered engine effects; you'll experience a dramatic set of sonic sounds infused into the cutscenes and transition sequences; you'll hear the sweet in-take of NOX. You'll also hear the realistic cop radio chatter ranging from casual level-one pursuits to level three crackdowns. The music is energetic and turbulent. It increases in volume and intensity as you're being chased by cops, and there is a good mix of rock and techno tunes.