1. It has no story, no background, no characters. Even a small intro with a few characters would have been interesting and appealing to gamers than nothing, you just get to see tutorials, see point 2.
2. Tutorials and cutscenes that can’t be skipped. What is more annoying that wanting to race and having to watch tutorials. In NFS Rivals it goes like this: start the game > tutorial > loading, you are exited that you are going to play > tutorial. And you can’t skip them. Playing since NFS 2, some gamers really need to watch tutorials? What about an option to disable them within one click.
3. Car chasing? Really? Instead of pure racing, we get the same old gameplay with cops vs racers. And there are two annoying things regarding this. 1. The awesome music switches when you are being chased. You want to race and relax with some awesome music? You can’t. What you can do is to turn off the music from the game and play the OST on Spotify or something similar.
And 2, you just want to race when suddenly you have to escape the cops. This gameplay aspect should have been optional.
4. No mouse cursor, all controls are ported from consoles. You have to use buttons like Page down/up and numpad 6 to interact with the game.
5. The game is badly optimized. There is a limit of 30 frames per second on the PC version, meaning that if you have a great PC with the latest hardware, it won’t matter at all. We have texture flickering, framerate drops, long loading screens.
6. Need for Speed Rivals does not support driving wheels.
7. You can’t even pause the game while being in a race.. If you want to change a setting while being in a race, be prepared to lose.
If you have thought that NFS Most Wanted (2012), the previous game from the franchise was bad, Rivals is almost unplayable.
On Metascore.com, the game has currently a score of 74/100 from the gaming magazines (bought by EA) and 2.8/10 from individual gamers that are saying their honest opinion.
What’s your opinion about the game?