Need for Speed Rivals (Xbox ONE)

Not often does a game get so on my tits to have me screaming at the TV but Need for Speed Rivals managed to succeed where lots of other games have failed. I cannot believe the amount of crap that I had to put up with during the game but I’ll get to that later. First, the ridiculous storyline.

You are a racer or a cop in some bizarre area of the USA where there is a snowy mountain, arid plains and seaside resort within 5 miles drive of each other. Why they couldn’t have had multiple locations is a mystery. Ignoring geography for the insane, as a racer you have to... race and avoid getting arrested while some voiceover guy talks about the importance of freedom and that obviously breaking the law is a really good way to show ‘the man’ that he isn’t going to keep you down. This is fair play in a world where you can’t kill anyone but having head on collisions is fine.

As a cop you have to bust the racers. But there’s more to it than that. It seems to be a personal vendetta between the police and the street racers which is probably why the game is called ‘Rivals.’ But it kind of undermines the whole ‘we are going to arrest you for breaking the law’ when even the cops treat it like a rivalry. It’s not like gang rivals where you actively compete with each for fame and acclaim. The cops should be taking out the racers because it’s their job – not to prove a bizarre point.

Basically the premise is wank.

The music is a-typical of the genre in that it portrays all racing types as listening to music that would be more at home in most clubs. Because everyone that drives fast is an 18 to 30 type who saves all their money for the season in Ibiza apparently? The music has revealed a new found hatred of Bastille through that stupid Pompeii song. I’m not sure it’s called singing during the first minute or so. The other issue with the music is that it restarts whenever you do anything and it’s not very good at mixing up its soundtrack meaning you often get the first two minutes of a song, then another one, then back to previous song, then another song, then the first song again, then Bastille five times. You get the drift.

Graphically, it is actually good. The cars look great, the environment looks great. The only issues are what happens in the world.

I’m going to start with the Kinect functionality. Apparently NFS Rivals has a built in voice Kinect capability. Who knew? Also, who knows what the commands are? Apparently there are voice commands (or hand action commands, who knows) that make you: look behind you when turning a corner; change into panoramic view when being chased by several police cars; reduce the in-game quick menu to include completely useless options and my personal favourite, leave an event. I only discovered the Kinect had been my Achilles’ heel when I got booted from an event, restarted and started verbally complaining about how it had made me leave the event. Apparently ‘fuck you, you fucking game’, ‘fuck off’, ‘what the fuck just happened?’ and ‘leave event’ are all voice commands for the same thing. Also, the back of the box, which I’ve only just read today, states that Kinect voice is optional. But the where the fuck was the option to turn this off in the first place!? It certainly wasn’t given to me as an option at the start of the game and definitely wasn’t made clear. I only got around it by physically turning off my Kinect.

The next stuff is all just standard bollocks from a racing game. A couple of standout issues I had was that my racing car, even when cranked up to the maximum strength level, was still made of wafers compared to the other racers. Also, apparently, if I crashed into to a wall and was being reloaded onto the road, more than often than not, the game would face me in the wrong direction. Another thing is that while you are being reloaded onto the road, if you are hit by another car, you still take that damage which is just ridiculously unfair when you can’t do it to NPCs and the fact that you have a wafer car.

Another thing on the general concept of the game – it involves you having to connect to a server to play with other people. This is the default option. Despite this running off of an EA server, there is a host migration which can cause your game to be interrupted quite frequently. You can avoid this issue by playing in a private room and I found this actually made my gameplay experience better... however, it completely counters the point of the game in the first place.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

All that stuff above makes the game fantastically more difficult than it should be, however it is still 90% grind, 10% skill. You basically have to get to level 60 with both racer and cop factions, both of which are sinfully boring after you’ve gone through one set of Speed Walls.

Everything else can be done by playing through the game and you will get them by the time you’ve got to the end of the rest of the achievements with potentially three exceptions. The first of these involves banking 500,000 points in one go. This can be easily be done by replaying an interceptor event near a repair shop once you have high level Electrostatic Field and Shockwave. There are a few events set up like this so it’s not an issue.

The other two involve playing with a friend. You have to win a race against a friend and bust a friend. I had a friend who was kind enough to do this with me but considering that the whole game is built around an online community style of play, it’s surprising that there are only two achievements that require you to play with other players.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I wouldn’t recommend playing this game or starting it now. The back of the box warns: EA may retire online features, online services and downloadable content after 30 days notice posted on www.ea.com/1/service.updates. Considering the age of the game, this could happen soon and it would effectively mean the end of the game in its entirety. 

Monopoly

I was casually browsing online as you do and was surprised to find that a Monopoly game even existed for the 360, nevertheless one that had been one since 2008. I had recently started playing Monopoly as a board game on a semi-regular basis so figured that the Xbox 360 version would be an easy completion as well as confirming the actual rules for the board game without allowing anyone to cheat.

While I was a hundred percent correct with the latter, I was slightly off with the former but more on that later.

The sound effects are seriously irritating throughout which seems to be the standard for these kinds of games. At least the music during actual gameplay is relatively quiet, however that doesn’t stop Monopoly Man from being the most sinfully annoying NPC is the history of the world.

The gameplay is where the game really falls down for lots of small reasons. Introductions and tutorials are all very well and good when you start playing a game but after that, they should be completely optional, skippable or maybe have a fast forward button attached to them. This is not the case for Monopoly. During every game, you are subjected to the ‘how to play’ information at the beginning of every action which turns even the shortest game into a drawn out affair.

I may have already mentioned that Monopoly Man is seriously annoying and here is why. He has a comment to make after every single move any player makes, even the NPCs. By the end of the first game, this could be conceived as charming. However, after the fifth game, he makes you want to climb through the television and beat him to death with his own cane.

Another minor quibble is that the menu to manage your properties take a lifetime to open (at least it feels that way with every other drawn out piece of crap building up to this point) and once you are there, the interface is really unintuitive and also glitches out from time to time. There is a button you need to click on to come out of the menu and despite having the cursor over this button, it will not let you click on it. So you have to move the cursor off of the button and the move it back on in order to get out of the menu. It’s almost like EA get more money for the more hours people play their games for.

The above only covers the classic mode of the game. There is another mode called Richest which consists of mini games and massive amounts of luck in order to win. There are four players and you each roll a dice. Then you compete against each other in mini games and whoever wins the game gets to select a dice. The number on the dice reflects how many squares of the board you occupy. You can play different types of this mode but the object is to be the richest player at the end of however many rounds you chose to play. So it’s completely luck based in essence but you can influence how much luck you get by selecting the most appropriate dice, high at the beginning and low towards to end.

Richest is more fun than Classic for the sole reason that the game has less opportunities to draw out the game with poor interfaces and unnecessary dialogue but it STILL has the unskippable tutorials which are present in every game you play.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

Firstly, Monopoly is made by EA, the most evil game company in the world, and I wouldn’t have even considered playing it if it had online achievements. The servers would have most likely been shut down by now, and heaven forbid they would allow local hosting even for a game with a maximum of four players and very little power required to play.

Anyway, enough about those twats - on to the achievements.

With the two game modes, come different achievements. There are 19 available in Classic and 15 in Richest. Now, the beauty to most of these is you can use local multiplayer to fix most of the skill based achievements that you don’t get playing legitimately. There are some notable exceptions to this, however, namely the 100% luck based achievements.

Rolling a double six is fine and is bound to happen in a few games of classic anyway. However, rolling three doubles to go to jail - an anti-achievement - is ridiculous. It took me ages to get this one and the only way to guarantee it is to keep playing over and over again which really hit home the gameplay issues above.

Other than that, the only other one which is problematic – and by problematic, I mean drawn-out and pointless – is the Globe Trotter achievement for landing on every property on the World Board. Factoring in the luck required to roll three doubles in a row, you now need the luck to land on all of the properties in one game. Without going out of your way, this is nigh on impossible to attain as it takes three hours minimum factoring in random chance to even get close to landing on them all. Playing a legitimate game would end long before that, even with the unskippable in between moves commentary.

There is also a time spending achievement which is for landing on every property on every board in the game. This can be done over multiple games though, so isn’t difficult, just time consuming.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It was nice to play an electronic version of Monopoly for all of two games, but after that it stopped being fun. Achievements wise, it is a monotonous grind. If you are going to go for the completion, I would recommend finding something to listen to/watch in the background. Either that or just don’t play it.