In Carbon Canyon, No One Can Hear You Sculpt...

By William Barker

Need for Speed: Carbon tasks players with taking over the city, block by block

The races in Need for Speed: Carbon can be remarkably rewarding at times, and it's often the close races that set the heart racing

This loser is the reason the physics engine is shot - I hate you digital man! Don't try and worm your way out of this - the damage is already done....

This is one of the boss canyon races, as you can see from the distance meter on the top right hand side of the screen

And this is the AutoSculpt screen, where this SS is currently being given low profile tyres

The Need For Speed (NFS) franchise is not, in fact, about narcotics abuse, but is indeed a game about an altogether different adrenaline pumping past-time - that of motor vehicle racing. Need For Speed: Carbon (NFS:C) is best described as a mixture between Saints Row on the Xbox 360, where your gang must take and hold areas of the city, and, um, a racing game. With nitrous and drifting and car customisation.

And do you wanna know something? Well, here it is: I remember playing the original NFS demo on my 486 PC back when my parents still wielded control over me, and boy, was it sweet (the game, not the biological prison).

You could only drive the Dodge Viper on this one track, but one of things that wowed me (at the time) were the realistic physics and the randomness of the crashes. BAM! Have at ye Viper of metallic contraptional becomings!

Sadly though, this simulation element of the Need For Speed franchise has been bled out in recent times, replaced by a more newbie-friendly arcade physics model that in my opinion is a little stifling, and while this game is cool in many ways, this one aspect makes what could have been one of the most innovative racing games ever made into a fairly hum-drum experience.

Set in Carbon Canyon, NFS:C starts off with the same high-res rendered garbage that was part of the Most Wanted, which is nice to look at I suppose (and with some half-decent cinematography), but is ultimately useless. I ask you, well-fed and smartly dressed directors of the game who drive a Lexus to work and only drink expensive coffee, why spend money on this full-motion video shit when you could have made the game better? What's that? Because you want mainstream approval from non-core gamers, which will ultimately make more money than I'll ever see in two lifetimes?? True, perhaps, but where's the dignity. There is none. It's gone.

EA has sworn fealty to its shareholders, not it's customers, and that means we are simply the means to an end: making money and returning dividends. Sadly, the core gamers who want innovation and realism are left behind in this greed-driven capitalist world...

So, the story is fairly loose to begin with - and in fact never really goes anywhere that you didn't expect - and centres on Carbon Canyon, the glittering city below, and an arch nemesis who seems to enjoy talking the talk. Simply put, you've got to start from scratch and put together a 'crew' and take over the region, one slightly-flawed race at a time.

Progression through the main part of the game - career mode - is fairly straightforward, and anyone who's been playing videogames for more than a year will have no trouble making a name for themselves in Carbon county.

First things first, you must choose a car. There's three categories - muscle, exotic and tuner. I like exotic the best, but muscle and tuner cars are pretty good too:

Muscle: good acceleration, average handling
Exotic: good top speed, medium handling
Tuner: average acceleration, good handling

Once you've chosen a car from the few available at the beginning (you can buy more later on, from a range of more than 40 speedsters, including Mercs, Lambos, Fords, Dodges, Alfa Romeos, Mazdas, Mitsubishis, Nissans and even the new Audi R8! drool...) it's time to take back the city, which is divided into various territories. Each territory must be conquered via racing different courses, usually about four races in each territory, which range from drift races, to circuit races and the mano-e-mano canyon descents that are a new feature in this game.

The drift races I hated to begin with - they felt too lose and I wanted to have to use handbrake to initiate a drift, rather than just start turning. So, accepting that the drift races are about as far from reality as my nightmares about parachuting from the saddle of a giant brown moth (his name is Mr. Moth), I actually ended up enjoying their unrealistic style, as you can link various corner drifts together and rack up some seriously cool combos in the process, and speed is also a factor. The faster you go, the more points you'll accrue and the higher the combo multipliers are.

Circuit races are standard fare, and pretty good fun, though the physics feel forced and the end result is less satisfying than playing something like Gran Turismo, Forza, or Project Gotham Racing. Still, each race win gets you cash, and with cash you can buy stuff. Sadly, there's no machine guns or inter continental ballistic missile launchers (ICBMLs), but you can buy new cars, new car parts and hire crew members.

Having a crew is another new feature to the game, and during races you can get your crew to block other racers, speed in front of you and help you enter the slipstream and draft to gain more speed. It's a nice feature in theory, and at the beginning of the game it's cool to target other cars to be blocked by your buddies, and hear them chattering on what? Mobile phones?? That's preposterous. It must be CB radios.

Whatever the case, they talk a fair bit during races, but by the time you've spent a few days with the game you may find them more of a hindrance than a help. Sometimes they even win races for you, which in my case left me feeling empty and desolate, like I'd baked a sponge cake to impress friends and family and then my mum said it was shit and gave it to the dog. So I used gluten-free flour... Why is that a crime?!

Each territory is ruled by a car gang (because the Irish and Italian mafioso are on holiday, it seems) and the gang leaders will make their presence felt at various times. Once you've beaten most of the races in a given territory, you'll compete with the gang leader, and if you win this race your next stop is Carbon Canyon where the action gets pretty serious.

The idea is brilliant with these canyon runs (though the execution is a little vague), and they encompass two stages. The first stage, you follow your foe, and the aim of this one-on-one canyon caper is to stay as close to your rival as possible, or even overtake him. Then, on the second run, the roles are reversed. You start out in the lead while the gang leader must try and stay as close as possible, with a small meter in the top right hand corner of the screen indicating the distance between you and your prey.

At the end of these pulse-pounding canyon races, which have very few straights and very many esses and tight hairpins, the distances from both runs are tallied and he who has the smallest distance wins. As well as being a one-on-one race, the nature of racing through a canyon is decidedly haphazard -- one wrong move and you'll careen off the side of a cliff only to die (albeit spectacularly) on the canyon floor, as your soul contemplates an eternity of failure as it rejects the physical body. Oh, the shame! Woe betide us all.... So yes, it's easy to fly off the edge because the barriers are weak and sloppy like an infirm mango. But I will say that I got a feeling of the old NFS games coming back in these instances, but sadly the physics are not quite tight enough to make this a compelling game mode.

What will compel you to keep playing are the cool cars to unlock, the online modes, the engine and bodywork mods to uncover and awesome AutoSculpt feature. This last new feature is one of the coolest things I've ever toyed with since Tiger Woods Golf let you create a completely unique player. First, you've got to hire a scout, and then you can start to mould your own bodywork. Each category of body kit - skirts, spoiler, front bumper, roof, hood, exhausts etc - can be modified by way of a 100 unit slider. Take the wheels for instance. There are four or five variables for depth, spoke number, hub type, tyre profile and so forth, and each of these has one of the 100 unit sliders. Zero usually being normal, and 100 being at the opposite end of the spectrum, which may take the five spokes of a 20-inch alloy wheel from being really thick, to breakably thin, and you can do some serious work to the bodykits too.

All of the aero bodykit work you do on your car via the AutoSculpt feature makes no difference to performance, which is rather shite, because if you angle the rear spoiler enough it should give increased downforce over the rear end of your Ford Mustang GT. But no, it's purely cosmetic. Though that's lamentable, it doesn't detract from the fact that there are few other car games out there that can offer this sort of customisation. It's a great feature, and will no doubt be cloned by all and sundry in due course.

So, this game is good, but not great. That much is true. Like NFS: Most Wanted, there's cops and stuff, and free roaming which adds an air of non-linearity. But deep down this game is flawed. The crux of the NFS:C - the racing and driving - feels stifled, it feels as though the cars are twice as heavy as they really are, though I should say that the new muscle car class offers the most realistic driving sensation, and some seriously tough-looking vehicles to boot.

Graphically, this game is quite good looking, and especially so on the PC and next gen consoles. It moves at a decent 25 fps but ultimately the visuals of the game were one of the least impressive aspects for mine. Considering EA has such huge reserves of programmers to call on, I would have thought this game would have had its gizzards optimised. It's flashy, with good lighting and particle effects, but doesn't look as good as Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2, and that's saying something. I thought it would move at a higher frame rate (especially on the Xbox 360 version) and look a bit better. Though the AutoSculpt feature is cool, it's kind of hard to see your artistic endeavours in game, but this is mainly due to the dark tone and entrenched night-racing elements.

Online play is a sweet bonus, though only the next generation versions get this. While the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game both look good and play very well, only the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game can be played online. But, if you have one of these advanced systems, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the various racing modes on offer, including a range of co-op races (where your 'crew' of blockers and drafters are now other human gamers, and this mode can be played offline in split screen), Pursuit Tag and Pursuit Knockout, and in these last two modes up to eight players can go at it.

Pursuit Tag involves one racer and the rest of the players as cops, and whenever a cop busts the racer, he becomes the racer, and to win you have to log the most time as the racer and avoid the cops. Pursuit Knockout is a bit different, and involves the traditional "he who laps last, will perish" mantra, on a standard circuit race with laps. But if you are in last place after a given lap, you don't die like in normal knockout races, but transform into a police car. And when you're a cop car, your goal is simple - smash your enemies to pieces. Yahzee! Those with next-gen systems or PCs can also download new cars and content from EA website, which is a nice touch, and makes better bang for your buck.

If you were already revved about this title and enjoyed both version one and two of NFS: Underground and NFS: Most Wanted and are disappointed to read my somewhat distasteful words, fret not, for as sure as the beard of King Neptune is covered in algae, you will enjoy this game. Taken as a totally unique entity and not looking at the back catalogue of the NFS franchise, it's quite a rewarding title with some solid gaming in there and fairly long single-player game.

But this is the NFS franchise, and in my opinion it'll only return to its glory days when the physics engine is made more realistic and when the millions of dollars spent on hiring models and actors to appear in worthless productions to further the story are cut from the game. They are cancerous growths, in good need of some radiation therapy. Still, it's a fun game with some nice innovations that almost hits the target dead centre. Maybe next time...

Game: Need For Speed: Carbon
System: Xbox
Players: 1-4
Online: No
Developer: EA Black Box
Distributor: EA

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)