Recent reviews by Rd. Vortex

Overall this game fails due to the cheating rubber band AI. Why have faster cars when the AI will cheat and fly past you with a slower car? Despite all the cheating to AI fails to provide much of a challenge. Sometimes the AI will even get so high speed boost into a corner, that they have no chance of making the turn and instead wall ride / bounce of the walls to make the turn.

Some of the negative things I faced in this game:

The way takedowns of opponents and cops can cause some really annoying and confusing situations. Sometimes I'd bust racers as a cop, when after a previous cutscene spawned me directly on a crash course with another racer. Coming out of a crash cutscene can also cause you to be heading towards a wall with almost no time to recover. The way these crashes get triggered also seems quite random at times. Sometimes you'll be crashing with traffic almost head on at 200km/h only to have your speed reduced. Other times hitting something at much lower speed will trigger a crash.

Taking down cops as a racer also seems to be quite pointless. In many cases the game will simply spawn more and more cops to chase you, thus turning the takedowns into nothing more but some extra points for advancing your rank.

The handling differences of the cars within a certain series are basically nonexistent. Sure, this isn't meant to be a simulation, but it would be nice if your car selection would have any impact on the handling at all. Now they all feel basically the same.

I also randomly experienced some odd performance slowdowns that fixed themselves after a couple of seconds.

Positive things about the game:

Unlike many other modern NFS games, this does actually have a bonnet camera. Thus you aren't forced to use the back camera like in many other games in the series. Yes, those games do have the bumper camera, but I consider that to be useless as it's so low that you cannot see anything even if there's a slighthest hill on the road.

You can turn of the damn siren, even during a chase event. There's no point in having it on IMHO since it has no effect on the traffic anyway. For example some events in Rivals force you to have the siren on.

The soundtrack is decent enough. It does have some really good tracks like Watercolour by Pendulum.

There aren't long unskippable cutscenes, I wish though that those that are in the game could be skipped.

Surprisingly playable, even though it's not even alpha yet. If you liked the older carmageddon games, you'll probably like this one too. However, since it's still pre-alpha don't expect anything in the game to work properly or it to have good frame rates (like some apparently do). I got this game early due to having been one of the Kickstarter backers. If you are considdering buying this game now, you are probably better of waiting at least a half year or even a full year until the game is more finished.