Written by: Rik
Date posted: May 30, 2025

While I have a tendency to view comprehensive coverage of the Need for Speed franchise between a certain time period as some kind of Sisyphean task beyond the capabilities of mere mortals, the truth is, of course, that playing one new arcade racing game per year is within the grasp of even casual fans of this long-running racing series. Indeed, such is the haphazard nature of my own reviewing schedule, I’m fairly sure I’ve made this exact point in a write-up before, although I can’t remember or seem to find out exactly where. [It was here, you berk – Ed.]

Anyway, Need for Speed: Rivals seems to be the logical end point for this particular quest, owing to its presence towards the newer end of games that we’d normally cover here, and the fact that it was the final release before they apparently ran out of naming ideas and just went with plain old Need for Speed for the next one, a 2016 effort that requires an always online connection and will inevitably be switched off or stop working at some point soon.

Speaking of which, I found to my horror upon starting the game that I was catapulted into an online session, with genuine internet strangers lurking on the roads, by default. You can fiddle around with the settings to turn this off, if you’re similarly discomfited by online gaming, but it’s hardly an intuitive process. At this point you’ll likely also discover that Rivals cannot be paused while you’re out on the road, a decision linked to maintaining the online experience which only compounds the irritation for the solo player.

As for the name, it does actually refer to a story, of sorts, rather than just being a generic subtitle, with Need for Speed: Rivals pitting a racer, Zephyr, against a cop who eventually becomes known by the codename F-8. This marks a return to the ‘play both sides’ career of Criterion’s Hot Pursuit, while blending in an element of storytelling that was a feature of the Black Box era, allowing you to build a reputation either as a bad boy racer or a hotshot street cop, while taking in earnest and mildly ludicrous voiceovers that explain why there is an urgent moral justification for your actions in each case.

You have freedom to roam fictional Redview County and participate in events as you wish, but in order to progress you have to complete a set of preset tasks, which you can vary according to the kinds of things you like to do. As a racer, you can choose between lists marked Race, Pursuit and Drive, which means that the tasks will broadly either be focused on winning races, stirring up trouble with the cops, or doing general showboating like big drifts and jumps. On the cop side, the rough equivalents are Patrol, Enforcer and Undercover.

It’s quite a nice way of being able to focus on the bits of the game you find more enjoyable, although there’s an element of crossover, not least because at key points the objectives for all three pathways are exactly the same. Progress unlocks more cars, which racers must purchase using their accumulated Speedpoints (earned through completing events and general racing merriment in the game world); cops, meanwhile, get their cars for free, but must pay to upgrade their various pieces of ‘pursuit tech’ – EMPs, spike strips, roadblocks, etc. (Some level of pursuit tech is available for racers, and it too costs points, but it’s a secondary consideration to upgrading vehicle and performance.)

In general, Rivals feels like a mashup of the previous three NFS games — a combination of the structure and basic ethos of Hot Pursuit, adding in the story and slightly heftier handling model of The Run, plus the online focus, drive-through repair garages and ‘EasyDrive’ system (allowing a quick restart and directions to the nearest key locations, controlled with the D-Pad) of Most Wanted (2012).

The racer career, unsurprisingly, contains the most excitement, and there are times when a series high point of the previous generation — Most Wanted (2005) — comes to mind, particularly as you set about tasks that require the achievement of a large points total, which are best earned by getting into trouble with the cops and raising your heat level to earn multipliers.

The stakes remain pretty low, however, and while it’s possible your correspondent’s own incompetence contributed to the length and stress-inducing qualities of MW (2005)‘s long chases, the fact that you had to lose the cops before returning to base really made you feel like you were in a battle. Here, possibly to mitigate the annoyance caused by being unable to pause, a return to your hideout means that all the pursuit cops immediately give up, regardless of your heat level, or their proximity to you at the time.

The cop career, meanwhile, feels a bit more like a job, with little incentive to do more than the bare minimum, and you head onto the roads to chase and then largely destroy racers’ cars with a combination of high-tech weaponry and psychopathic ramming to complete your list of tasks as quickly as possible. Progress is helped by the fact that opponent racers at higher levels seem unwilling or unable to make use of defensive technology, making them little more than sitting ducks. Meanwhile, the climactic race and chase, a marathon effort in the racer career, is an extremely brief affair from the cops’ side.

To the tired eyes of this old-timer, it all still looks very nice, and the dynamic weather is a nice touch. However, the frame rate is locked at 30 fps, and though unofficial fixes exist you do always risk borking the game in some other way (you can make your own choices, but I was sufficiently unbothered by the frame rate issue to investigate further). The EA installer plonked 64 and 32-bit launchers on my desktop, and I did have an issue with scenery textures that only seemed to occur with the 64-bit version, but that was the only glitch I experienced. The music, meanwhile, sort of washed over me, with only a slightly remixed version of Pompeii by Bastille making any kind of impression.

And then you have the cut-scenes, which are very hard to take seriously, and indeed it’s difficult to work out if that’s how they’re meant to be taken. Gone are the fake tattoos and ludicrous outfits of the mid-00s, replaced by footage of racing being watched on a laptop while our unseen protagonists describe the latest developments in tones of studied intensity as if describing the end of civilisation itself. Part of the problem, I think, is that while the 00s world of illegal street racing and souped-up Nissans did have some kind of legitimacy as an anti-establishment subculture, there is literally nothing rebellious about owning or driving a supercar. Nor is it personally particularly edifying to role-play as an officer in a hyper-militarised police force.

Still, the biggest thing missing here is excitement. Rivals is pretty solidly made and technically competent, and if the goal was indeed to try and consolidate some elements of its most recent predecessors, then that has been achieved with some success. It doesn’t exactly make for an exciting fresh start for the series, though. Events that require multiple attempts are in short supply, with those marked ‘hard’ still being very forgiving of crashes and fairly major errors, allowing you to blunder through and claim a gold medal, and maximum points, regardless.

Such an approach may reflect a deliberately anti-repetitive ‘go anywhere, do anything, don’t get stuck’ ethos of the open world. However, for anyone who, like me, considers beating a tough race, after repeatedly slapping the controller to restart yet again and muttering ‘this must be [expletive] impossible’ under their breath a key part of the arcade racing experience, it makes the action here feel slightly underwhelming.

While playing trickier racing titles over the years, I’ve often been punished for allowing my mind to wander to the potential content of a review when I should have been keeping my eyes on the road. Perhaps I was unduly affected by thoughts that this might be the last NFS I write about here, but — barring one or two calamities (the reduced visibility caused by opponents’ off-road driving and other chaos ahead is another nice, if occasionally vexing, feature) — I was largely free to descend into blurry reminiscences of the series’ past, which seemed only to heighten the sense that Rivals represents a hodgepodge of past features and ideas.

We’ve mentioned the previous three games already, but I’m talking about something broader than that. As the cops chatter over the radio, there are reminders of Need for Speed III and how exciting it was to first hear them discuss your antics and plan to take you down; idly hammering the nitro button, now just a slightly wimpy and refillable mini-boost (but also supplemented by a parallel ‘turbo’ upgrade) turns the mind to the inclusion of nitrous oxide in Underground and the adrenaline rush of those blurry visuals as you found the right moment to hit the button and race to the limits of your control; while racking up points and evading capture recalls the sweatier moments of Most Wanted (2005), almost tempting you into recklessly abandoning the safe haven of the hideout just to see how long you can keep these cops on the run.

The police missions, in particular, also offer reminders of the series’ dodgier moments, such as the uninspiring GTA-alike missions in Undercover, and also of games that have done car-based combat better, like Bizarre Creations’ peerless Blur. (Not to mention the urge to convene some kind of multi-jurisdictional meeting of all fictional NFS police forces — Bayview, Rockport, Fairhaven, Palmont et al. — and state once and for all, on a single Powerpoint slide, the groundbreaking idea that a roadblock should span the whole width of the road).

I started this review by repeating myself, which somehow feels appropriate. Though the series has subsequently been rebooted and endured into a fourth decade (and, yes, I have bought more NFS titles, unable to resist various Steam sales), for me, Rivals does feel like the end of something. On its own merits, it’s a perfectly ok-to-good arcade racer, which may tick some boxes for those who haven’t played a NFS game in a while (or at all), but for longer-time fans, it may feel like it has little new to offer.