What you won’t like
Getting along with strangers
Although the execution of the persistent world design seems really solid, it makes some unfortunate assumptions on both human nature and logistics. The free-roaming system begins to crack when the player wants to move on from racing CPU opponents and begins hunting human prey. Straight up, playing with friends is damned near mandatory for matchmaking to work. Random sessions were usually filled with people who had muted everybody and were ignoring everyone else in the room, leaving only the people who are trolling with racial slurs and yelling at their cousins that are in the same room as them. This leaves only a few options to find a human opponent: Go to the garage and strategically spawn near a human opponent, utilize the GPS to route you to another human being, or hide in some bushes or an underpass and wait for a car controlled by a human to come speeding by.
If you haven’t been as diligent at knocking out the single-player objectives as the person you’re trying to ambush in multiplayer, you both face another problem: You’re not a good match to begin with. This means even if you successfully get them to join you in a multiplayer race, it can get boring quick, as one of you blows the doors off the other in no time at all. This actually becomes a serious motivator for winning the automobile arms race as soon as possible. The threat of being blown out by a stranger, not so much the narrative (which is “enh”), pushed me to blast through the single-player objectives as diligently as possible. If I was going to lose to someone after all that work trying to initiate a race, it would be because they disappeared in my rear view, not so much me scanning the far horizon in front of me for any sign of a floating PSN tag.
Rubber-banding
That good-old taboo A.I. trick is definitely present in Need For Speed: Rivals, where if you’re blowing the CPU opponents out of the water they suddenly become incredibly fast and can successfully perform impossible feats to catch up to you — effectively “rubber-banding” themselves into contention. It also occasionally works the other way around, where the CPU A.I. will suddenly get worse if it is completely destroying you.
I’m sure hardcore fans will find this blasphemous, but I think rubber-band A.I. can be necessary and tastefully done. Playing as a racer, the rubber-banding only became blatantly obvious when it worked for me rather than against me. I’ve had A.I. vehicles feel like they are at least a half a mile ahead of me, and then couple drifts around a handful of corners later, the first- and second-place A.I. vehicles are suddenly in front of me in a slow-moving, two-car funeral procession.
When it worked against me as a racer, I saw it as the game replicating boost and turbo elements in the design. It is always completely believable that these cars could catch up to me given the rules of that design. When being hunted by the cops in a ridiculously heated chase, I’ve caught the game spawning more patrol cars behind me that appear to already be in full speed. Again, the rules of the game dictate that this is supposed to happen. It’s simulating cops driving in from other areas to join the chase.
Some minor weirdness
You also should look out some occasional bugs. Some innocent texture- and material-rendering glitches result in what looks like the normal map popping up in patches in the background, possibly linked to the game updating weather conditions and prerendering the scenes ahead of you. You also may see an occasional weird-ass Head-to-Head startup bug where the car you challenge will suddenly pull a sharp Tron cycle-esque 90-degree turn in an unnatural direction and speed off, where the race had actually started one street over. Car-spawning can also sometimes get a little weird, with one spawn putting me right in the middle of a group of cop cars smashing into me as if they had been chasing me for five minutes.
You can also occasionally drive your car through the crash camera. Although this was also possible in Burnout, it sometimes confuses the game and will keep the camera stuck onto a side view, with the car being in spawn limbo.
These are all minor and weird glitches, but they pop up with some frequency.
Conclusion
Need For Speed: Rivals’ main theme is about blurring the stringent lines between two things we consider to be opposites. Challenging the traditional definitions of two opposing ideals and showing that they are not just more similar than you think — but require each other to exist. It’s all very yin-and-yang, and the theme is implemented in every aspect with varying degrees of success. The mixing of single-player and multiplayer gameplay is the most obvious and calculated element to take on the theme, and is the one thing that really excited me throughout my time with Rivals. It is a fantastic idea that company spokespersons on convention stages have been promising would change the way we game in this next generation.
While I wouldn’t buy into that industry hype quite yet with Need For Speed: Rivals, it’s a promising step toward those good intentions. It just relies a little too much on the “Internet Human Behavior” planets aligning in its favor to make the matchmaking in random sessions work. When you do finally find that perfect match, it’s a great “cat vs. mouse” arcade racing experience for this generation’s launch.
Score: 80/100
Need For Speed Rivals is now available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, and it comes out on the Xbox One on Nov. 22. Electronic Arts provided GamesBeat with a PlayStation 4 copy for the purposes of this review