Why Need for Speed : Carbon deserves more respect

Ask someone about the good old days of Need for Speed, they immediately get nostalgic about Most Wanted, Underground 2 and even Hot Pursuit 2. Carbon just gets criticized for its lack of police (I agree that’s true) and is put aside. Join me as I tell you what Carbon did right and why it is my favorite out of the Need for Speed series.

1. Variety

Previous games generally had a theme with their cars, exotics in Hot Pursuits and tuners in the Underground games. Carbon on the other hand pleases everyone with cars ranging from a ‘69 Charger to a SLR Mclaren, with enough distinctions between them. One could stick to certain class throughout the game or use different car classes with different events.

After Underground 2, the customization in Most Wanted felt lackluster but Carbon brought it back with it blowers sticking out of hoods, full vinyl editor and of course Autosculpt. Yes, the scissor doors and hydraulics were gone but by that time we were past that phase.

2. Handling model

The handling model was already really good in the past games but EA continued to fine tune it till it reached it prime in Carbon, mashing the throttle while coming out of a corner in a Viper made the tires vaporize into smoke but an Evo could carve a path in the canyon roads with the precision of a sniper rifle. Most Wanted got boring for me as most cars handled like they were cemented to the road.

They even got rid of the very awkward drag racing in the past games, where you had to change lanes to avoid traffic but you would end up clipping a NPC by a pixel and it would wreck your car. Drifting got improvements as well.

3. Story, a continuation

Playing racing games for their story is like buying a Ford Excursion for its fuel economy but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them. Carbon could have easily had a run of the mill ‘start from the bottom’ story with new characters but the writers actually bothered to make it a continuation from Most Wanted and even bring back everyone’s favourite Cross. Not only the cheesy cutscenes made a return, motion capture was also used for the characters. All this for a racing game plot.

Thank you for reading till the end, I know that I didn’t give many points but that’s because Most Wanted was already a brilliant game with not much room for improvement.