Need for Speed: Rivals Reviews
A fun, engaging arcade racer with thrills, spills, explosions and crashes aplenty, Need for Speed: Rivals is let down by the largely pointless AllDrive and a lack of race types. A mixed bag.
'Need for Speed: Rivals' offers more visceral fun than ever in the series' next-gen debut.
Excellent driving mechanics and visuals are sadly hindered by too many major issues.
Need for Speed: Rivals delivers a satisfying foray into a new generation for the racing genre with impressive, integrated multiplayer and sleek graphics.
There's a fantastic game hiding inside of Need for Speed Rivals, but there aren't enough systems in place to draw that greatness out where it belongs.
A good arcade racer that is fun to pick up and play, but after awhile the lack of depth will leave you wanting more.
It's most certainly a launch title racer and it's not doing much to rectify that. I'm reminded of the limited scope of Motorstorm as a launch racer for PS3. Like Motorstorm, however, the core Gameplay is solid enough to earn a recommendation to NFS fans
Need for Speed: Rivals is an exceedingly high-powered racer with all sorts of flash and panache. It insists that you pay attention; it demands that you continually seek out the next adrenaline rush, and it pushes you to take bigger and bigger risks. When there's a little too much overlap between the open-world action and the single events, I get irritated, but it's a worthy sacrifice.
Need For Speed Rivals is decently fun, but marred by underwhelming presentation, an insanely stupid story, unfair AI, and repetition.
Low on innovation but high on spectacle, as the cumulation of the last several years of Need For Speed games the first entry on the next gen is already one of the best.
Need for Speed: Rivals is one of the most impressive launch games for PS4. It is very pretty visually, and it has enough content to keep players busy for quite some time. There are some drawbacks to its design, but nothing that will derail the fun. For those looking for that next-gen racing experience…well this is really your only option on PS4. But I am glad it is an option, because it is incredibly impressive and fun.
Need For Speed: Rivals' main theme is about blurring the stringent lines between two things we consider to be opposites. Challenging the traditional definitions of two opposing ideals and showing that they are not just more similar than you think — but require each other to exist. It's all very yin-and-yang, and the theme is implemented in every aspect with varying degrees of success. The mixing of single-player and multiplayer gameplay is the most obvious and calculated element to take on the theme, and is the one thing that really excited me throughout my time with Rivals. It is a fantastic idea that company spokespersons on convention stages have been promising would change the way we game in this next generation.
If you like to bring grief to other players, this may be the racing game you've been waiting for.
What is Rivals? It's the assertion that EA's true flagship for the core in the new generation isn't Battlefield, but Need for Speed. It's thrilling, it's beautiful, it's chaotic, and it's the best thing going on those expensive new black boxes you have. Ghost Games, the spawn of Criterion, really brought it.
Rivals brings a solid, core competency while introducing interesting new online features. Unfortunately, these features never quite gel to their full potential.
Fast, furious, and fun. NFS: Rivals blends Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted to great effect.
Overall, Need for Speed: Rivals delivers the most solid racer to come from EA in a long time. The ability to play as both Cops and Racers is a welcome gameplay diversity that gives you the power to choose how to play the game. Back that up with a seamless multiplayer, a solid audio foundation, and killer visuals, and what you get is one of the best racing games to come out in recent years. Whether you choose to be a Cop or a Racer, either way you're going to have a lot of fun, which is what gaming is all about.
Retains many of the staples from the Need for Speed series, but paves its own path with its dynamic shared worlds
Need for Speed: Rivals is one of the more fun installments in the series, and certainly a great PS4 launch title. But it needs deeper customization and tweaks to racing SP loss in order to more fully realize its potential, and a more involved attempt at a story would inject some life into a relatively stale campaign mode. Fortunately gameplay is so intense and fun you forget about most of the game's other issues, and it can certainly be enjoyed despite its lingering issues and relative lack of depth.
It's not the most stable racer, but Need for Speed Rivals puts spectacular ideas to great use