When I was first charged with reviewing
Need for Speed: Carbon for the Wii I was disappointed. Anything that takes away from my incessant
Zelda/Wii Sports/Rayman regimen is assuredly a bad thing. To my great surprise however, I actually found the game to be quite enjoyable in spite of it’s absurd “Fast and the Furious” story scenes.
Much like when the DS initially launched, few of the Wii’s launch titles really do the system justice. There are a few high points, like the aforementioned
Rayman and sports, and of course the gussied up Game Cube game that is
Zelda:TP, but mostly its just cheap cross-platform crap that only barely uses the Wii Remote in any worthwhile way. Imagine my surprise then, when after several hours of play I still found myself compelled to keep playing
NFS:C instead of swapping it out for one of my current favorites. Not to say that it trumps any of the other titles I listed, but it was just fun enough to keep me from turning it off, a substantial feat when considering my other options.
It’s not the graphics, or bizarre FMV story, but the controls that kept me interested. Not only did I spend hours sampling the different control methods the Wii allows, but I also had a ton of fun racing once I found a favorite.
There are two main configurations available, Classic /
Excite Truck style, where just the Remote is used: griped like a steering wheel and tilted side to side, the buttons used for gas and break. Then there’s the Nunchuck attached options wherein the Remote’s motion sensing is used to manage gas and break and the Nunchuck’s sensing controls the steering.
Using your hand as a foot might seem counterintuitive, but try looking at it like using one hand to steer and the other to manage forward/reverse and all other options. This feels a good deal more like actual driving than any controller method ever before.
The game itself is a competent racer, nothing more. The open environments are nice but nothing that hasn’t been going on for the past several years. Handling is fine, a nice mix of realism and arcade that’s easy enough to pick up and play but rewards practice and skill. Basically if you’ve played an
NFS game in the past 5 years you’ll feel right at home here.
Since the Wii’s online component is still inoperable and only two-player split screen is available, the single player is really the focus of the game. Some of you who played last years
Need for Speed: Most Wanted are already familiar with EA’s unique method for story telling in the series. For the uninitiated it’s basically a collection of first-person perspective videos comprised of FMV and in-game graphics. One would assume this would look like total bunk, but all the live-action characters are glossed over, and over-saturated so much that they blend in with the plastic looking car models miraculously well.
The story is passable considering how tertiary it is to the actual gameplay, but judged on its own merits it’s rather generic and doesn’t really serve to inspire continued play. Basically you used to be a street racer in Carbon Canyon. The cops caught several of your crew. You escaped and disappeared for a while. Now you’re back, and as extreme as ever, for ‘realz’. Ugh.
Anyway, the cut scenes are well put together, the acting is lame but not as painful as I had anticipated and, in spite of its averageness, the FMV makes the game worthier of the admission price than many of its current competition
