EASS06: Need for Speed: Carbon hands-on

What is Need for Speed Carbon? Is it Underground? Is it Most Wanted with the lights out? It’s a bit hard to tell. The focus is clearly on battling for territory, which makes for a good deal of the races to be placed in urban settings. But when the stakes are really high, you are faced with narrow mountain roads with devious hairpin turns where you have to concentrate just as much on not falling off the mountainside as beating your opponents.

An important aspect of Need for Speed is the option of tweaking the appearance of your car. This feature is of course present in Carbon but in a new version which EA calls Auto Sculpt. It’s a very organic feature – you just pull some sliders and the car changes in front of your eyes. Cool stuff.

EA had two versions on display for the Studio Showcase. The Xbox 360 version looked almost complete but the very early PS3 version seemed rough and... well very early. According to the developer it still has plenty of time and feel it had gotten far in getting to know the hardware, so prospects are good.

While the development of these two versions is progressing well there seems to be a problem as to how to make the most use of the Wii controller. Initially it seems pretty straightforward: the pedal goes to the metal and you need to be able to turn. But the developer has tried a lot of things and still don’t feel it has quite nailed it yet. It’ll be exciting to see what EA ends up with.

I had the opportunity to race a few laps with the Xbox 360 version and the racing experience is satisfying, if you are a fan of Need for Speed that is. I still think it’s too close to Underground which is a shame seeing how much I like Most Wanted.

On the question whether it was possible to switch between night and day I was told that it would take twice the amount of work that had already been done so that’ll have to wait till next time.

Carbon will ber released on PC, DS, GBA, GC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360 and Xbox in the autumn.


Source: Boomtown DK
English version by Julian Henlov (Progrock)