Review: Need for Speed Heat Revs Up with Ridiculous Action but Real Stakes

To the game’s credit, the police presence on the track feels less like a hook than a genuine menace.

Need for Speed Heat

Racing games benefit from a hook, and police interference has always filled that role for the Need for Speed series. And to the credit of Need for Speed Heat, the police presence on the track finally feels less like a hook than a genuine menace. That presence is baked so deeply into the game’s atmosphere that even when the cops aren’t actively in pursuit, you can still sense them, sometimes literally so, as in the way the borders of your nighttime route pulse with the electric red-and-blue glow of a police siren.

Here, too, the force of the law is both intense and immediate. Indeed, there’s nothing game-y about the way the very first mission in Heat ends with your initial player character, Joe, quitting racing entirely after a crew of over-empowered police officers nearly kill him. Sure, this is what opens the door for your nameless, customizable character to take his place—his loss is your gain—but the moment is a good reminder that your gains are easily lost.

In a nod to the way the series once allowed players to swap between cops and racers, Heat allows your character to experience two versions of Palm City, a fictionalized version of Miami. By day, you’ll drive professional organized races, earning bank without fear of reprisal from the police. And by night, you’ll race on the underground circuit to earn street rep, which serves to unlock new missions, races, and upgrades. The longer you race at night, the higher your heat level rises, but the harder it becomes to escape the police. The race may end when you cross the finish line, but the cops will keep deploying cars, choppers, spike traps, armored Rhino SUVs, and more at you until you’ve either shaken their pursuit and returned to a safehouse or you’ve been busted, which breaks your heat multiplier and takes a hefty percentage of your money. Need for Speed Payback may have been set in a fictionalized Las Vegas, but Heat’s nighttime racing, especially the high heat variants of each course, are actual gambles.

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Progression through Heat, particularly under the hood, is also much improved over Ghost Games’s last few titles in the Need for Speed series. You’ll still be grinding out cash and reputation in individual events, but unless you keep losing all your money to the police, the various circuit races, off-road rallies, online time trials, and drift duels provide more than enough variety to keep your vehicle tuned up. There’s also more room for customization, as every vehicle lands somewhere on a matrix of race/drift and on-road/off-road performance, and you can swap out tires, suspension, and gears until you find a fit that works for your playstyle. You can even earn cars and parts by gathering collectibles across the game’s 18 districts, which not only gives players more of a reason to roam free across urban streets, industrial docks, a mountainous observatory, an abandoned spaceport, and a skidding swampland, but makes equipment feel earned as opposed to simply bought.

Of course, some of these more realistic touches feel a bit at odds with the game’s over-the-top arcade racing and all the goofy physics that come along with it. However high the stakes may be, they’re tempered by the knowledge that if you slam into a truck head first at 150 miles an hour, that’ll only slow you down for a few seconds. You can technically damage your car enough that you get busted, but so long as you don’t cross that threshold, driving off a cliff remains one of the most effective ways to evade the police. The AI also blatantly cheats, and while that’s expected in a racing game, it’s infuriating to watch the cops spawn reinforcements out of the blue. Then again, the way in which Heat accurately represents police as an unfair, often unfun, and sometimes frustrating force may just be its most impressive feature.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

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Score: 
 Developer: Ghost Games  Publisher: Electronic Arts  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: November 8, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Mild Violence, Language  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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