Overdue Review: Need for Speed: Heat

The latest installment in the Need for Speed series makes one thing very clear from the outset: when you are illegally street racing at night in the fictitious Florida city of Palm City, it is life and death. If the breakneck turns don’t kill you, the cutthroat corrupt cops just might.

Welcome to Need for Speed: Heat, released in 2019, anonymous out-of-town racer. You will have your choice of a few starter cars, and choose wisely, you may be relying on it for a long time. Even when my ’65 Mustang wasn’t a viable street racer anymore, I converted it to an off-road vehicle because being so upgraded as it was it made for a better rally racer than any other option I saw.

This game was a lot of fun for me. A lot of times, I have so much latent anxiety it is hard to commit myself to playing a game. But, I found Heat so addictive and joyous I binged the whole thing in under a week. It fostered such a fantastic passion for play with edge-of-your-seat thrills. It was not a perfect experience. The enemy AI was a bit unfair at times, there are a few bugs, and some other minor issues like repetitive and uninspiring music. (Although I almost can’t complain about the music, as I love a game that lets me turn off game music and put on a record as I play. )

I played the whole game on “Medium” difficulty, out of Easy, Medium and Hard. This was a consistent challenge that really pushed me to get better at the game and grind away to unlock parts and cars. When leaving your garage in Heat, you select Day or Night. During the day, you race or drift on closed tracks for cash. At night, you compete for experience to unlock cars and parts to buy, and you also are up against police and traffic as nighttime is illegal street racing.

I beat the game in about thirty hours. It was quite addictive, as I did the whole stretch over five days of playing every day. My internet has been out, you see, so I cannot do my job and I had just downloaded the game before the internet failed. I thought at least I could get a blog out of it.

Those thirty hours were gleefully spent. What compelled me to play the game was, first, it was available as EA Play is now part of Xbox Game Pass. Second, I have loved the Need for Speed games since the original PlayStation days. I thought back on all my joys playing racing games of old, in particular 2013’s Need for Speed Rivals. A game where I made great memories, probably my favorite Need for Speed of all time. Heat is a slightly different experience. The arcade style racing was very much still there, as were a taste of the cop chases you would experience in Rivals.

The learning curve of this game is solid all the way to the end, and into endgame. More on endgame in a moment. The ability to tap then slam the gas to drift into turns is an ability that is both fresh, fun and difficult to master. The handbrake is still there, and at times favorable. As your cars get faster and faster, they become more difficult to control as well at these high speeds. Off-roading and drifting provide unique challenges with depth.

You as a racer have a Reputation level, and your individual cars have numerical grade levels. Reputation is not helpful to accomplishing goals besides unlocking new races, cars and parts. As far as car grade goes, you always want to be as far above the recommended level as possible. I found at least 20 points ahead was very helpful.

The story does nothing to astonish, but honestly what do we want from a Need for Speed game? The fact that it even has a coherent story is remarkable. The ending even left me with complex emotions. The sheer joys of the final mission, one of the many in this game in which a good performance is enormously satisfying, the catharsis of seeing some closure to the story but the game leaves you with a right hook. Don’t worry, you can keep racing after the final campaign mission.

The customization is everything I want from Need for Speed. Underbody lights for cars, colored tire smoke and more, tons of decal options, custom body kit parts, upgrading performance parts from motor parts and swaps to chassis upgrades and both a passive and active ability, and a bevy of character creation options. A pre-Covid game, it predicted we might want some masks for our racer. Like I said with my offroad Mustang, cars can be tuned to different performances, offroad and on-road, by racing and drift. Somewhere on that 2×2 grid is where your car falls.

There is a host of endgame content. Characters to interact with, races and drift events, both day and night, cars to buy, collectibles and challenges. Old races get upgraded to higher difficulty throughout the game and you often find yourself grinding the same races over and over again. This would be more fun if it kept track of course times for you to compare. Police chases are too difficult to be much fun, but this may change as I proceed through endgame content. You can play to Reputation level 50. I was 31 when I beat the main campaign.

I will likely continue to play to see if police chases become more fun. Chases go up to heat level 5, which includes a helicopter, spike strips, police sports and super cars, and armored trucks designed to collide head-on. At heat level 3 is when they really start combing the area for you and you should get to a garage immediately, before you lose almost all the Reputation you’ve earned over the night, and a grip of your cash even if you haven’t earned any over the night. They take from your savings for that one. It is best to avoid cops if at all possible.

Overall, I highly recommend this game to anybody who likes arcade style racers. I may go back to EA Play and download Need for Speed Payback, a 2017 game, after enjoying Heat as much as I have. Although I will stick to Heat for a while into endgame I’m sure.