Kittyokc's Full Review: Need for Speed™: Carbon for Nintendo Wii
When my son heard that Need for Speed: Carbon was coming out for the Wii, he wanted it. We've played the other Need for Speed games and although he doesn't always do the career mode on them, he has always had lots of fun playing it.
If you've been a fan of the Need for Speed series and always did the career/story modes, you'll be able to follow the story better than others. I have to admit that we didn't always follow the story on the other games, we just did a lot of driving around and racing, but didn't always follow the story, so some of the references to the past was lost on us. Basically, Carbon picks up where Most Wanted left off and in the career mode in this game you are suppose to take over the city. The city is divided into different blocks which are all controlled by rival gangs/crews, you will have to race these gangs/crews in different races to take over the block and hopefully, take over the entire city. The heat will get turned up when you have to face the rival gang/crew leaders in the canyon for some more treacherous racing, where all can be won or lost.
You can upgrade your car, as usual, with all different sorts of things to make it not just run better, but look better too. Sometimes my son will spend a lot of time just messing with how his car looks, not necessarily how good it is, thank goodness for being able to have more than one save on the game. Currently, we have three saves, one for me, one for my customizing son and another for my older son.
Carbon brought in a new feature of crew members to help you. You'll need to hire these guys carefully and choose carefully when to use them, use the wrong guy and he could hinder more than help you. You've got blockers, drafters and other guys to help you in the garage, you'll probably end up having one of each just in case as you work your way through the game, but you have to be careful with some of them. Like if your helper is a drafter and he's way ahead of you, you ask him for help and because of his "job" he can't block the other guys that are ahead of you, instead he will slow up so you can catch up to him, thus allowing him to "help" you, unfortunately this can cause you to lose the race if he lets your opponent go by him. I've also had it where I asked my blocker to block for me, I was running third and he was first, I was hoping he'd block the guy in second, but nope, the guy actually dropped back to try and block any of the other opponents from passing me. Talk about frustrating! If I use the crew members in a race, it will usually be the blockers though, they have come in handy on more than one occasion.
You'll have three different modes to choose from: Career, Challenge and Quick Race. Career is where you'll follow the story of the game and try and take over the city, you can also do free roaming in this part, which is what my youngest son usually does, but this is the main game. Challenge is where you can face a bunch of challenges. I have to admit, we haven't tried any of this mode as of yet, we will usually do the Career or Quick Race modes. Quick Race is basically where the two player portion comes in, where you can challenge a friend to a race or do it as one player to get some practice on the different races, which is good if there are certain ones you're having trouble with.
The controls take some getting use to. There are five different control setups to choose from, but we use the default, which is where the wiimote is held sideways and you tilt it from left to right to steer your car and use the buttons to accelerate, brake, call a crew member, etc. While it may sound easy, it's not, it's pretty easy to over steer the car and sometimes it's hard to steer on the tight turns without slowing down a lot. We haven't tried any of the other setups, but some use the nunchuk, but I've heard that it doesn't make it that much easier to turn. You need to make sure that your wiimote is not running low on batteries when you play this or you will get very frustrated with the response time. Not that the controls are bad or anything, I just think they could have spent a bit more time fine tuning it a bit, especially for when you come up to the tight turns. Don't worry though, you can still win, you'll just have to be on your toes when it comes to the races with the tight turns and there are quite a few of them.
The look of the game isn't bad, I think it's comparable to what most realistic people expect to find on the Wii. There's nothing that will blow you away, as this isn't the wow-type of console, but the graphics and scenes are pretty decent. Could they have spent more time on the graphics? Probably, but I think they were trying to get a workable game for the Wii using the Wii control scheme instead of leaving Nintendo out of the loop.
Sounds and music are on par with what you would expect, you have all the general sound effects of racing, skidding tires, crashing into things, etc. As far as the music, it depends on the kind of music you like if you'd like all the music in the game. A lot different types of music, all with a strong beat fill the background of the game, if you don't like the music, you can always turn it down in the options. My son loves anything with a beat and is always open to new types of things, so he enjoys hearing the different types of music on the game, although we have heard my husband ask more than once for us to turn it down, but he's very picky about music.
Now, on to the racing. While the controls aren't perfect (are they ever?), the races are still fun. There are many different types of races throughout the game, some are a lot easier than others. You have your checkpoint races, circuit races, sprint races and of course, pursuit, just to name a few. When you come up to a challenge in career mode, it'll explain to you what type of race it is and off you go. My youngest son likes the pursuits the most, the one where you have to evade the police and I have to admit, I like those the most too. Sometimes it's pretty easy and sometimes it seems impossible, but it is fun watching the amount of money all that damage you're doing add up. You have to be careful though, you won't be going up against just regular cops, they will throw in the helicopters, spike strips and even SUVS. Once you get too much damage done, the Feds will come in too and they are harder to evade. It's still fun though, just don't get caught, especially if the amount you would owe is more money than you have, you could lose your ride.
I have to admit that I kind of cheat a little on the racing though. If I come up to a race that I have tried over and over again and still can't beat, I'll have my oldest son try it for me. He's a lot better at the racing portion of the game than any of us are, so I'll ask him to help get me past it, if I didn't, I'd probably still be back at some of the early races, getting frustrated trying to win them and I almost always have him do the drift races for me, I just have a hard time with them. I'm not sure if it has to do with the controls or what, but I'm a terrible drifter.
All in all, the game is fun. Yes, the controls take getting use to, but that's the way it is on most Wii games and my youngest son has a blast just driving around, crashing and evading the cops, so while I might get frustrated with it, he still has fun and that's what it's all about, having fun.
In Need for Speed - Carbon, what starts in the city is settled in the canyons. Risk everything in the world's most dangerous and adrenaline-filled fo...More at J&R Music and Computer World
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