Simply put, Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City is the best street racer you can buy for the DS.
New Gameplay Features:
Race Rewind allows you to rewind time up to 8 seconds or so. After you hit an SUV that some idiot is inconsiderately driving on your racing line around the blind corner you just took sucks. Now you can rewind time and take the corner a little differently to avoid the accident. It doesn’t rewind your lap time though, so you won’t be getting any lap records when using rewind.
Slow Motion allows you to enter bullet time for a short period. Your cars handling changes in bullet time allowing you to turn sharper to avoid a crash or to make a corner you saw too late.
The Wingman feature allows you to take a wingman with you into a race. You unlock wingmen as you beat the zone bosses in career mode. There are two classes, the Attacker and the Drafter, each offering different abilities. The Attacker is for the offensive player, hunting out cars in front of you and ramming them off the road. The Drafter is for the tactician, racing in front of you and allowing you to slip-stream him. While slipstreaming you recharge your nitrous, slow motion and rewind bars. This allows you to use them a lot more in the race.
Controls:
There are a few different control methods that can be selected from the options. Select from using the shoulder buttons or the face buttons for accelerating and braking. The touch screen is also used for input during the race and displays the dashboard of your car in game. It has left and right wing mirror icons in the lower corners which when touched, give you a rear view as seen from the mirror on the top screen, this is a nice touch. You also use the touch screen to activate your wingman and also change car setup settings for the advanced player during the race to tweak handling. The dpad is used to steer and allows you to hold up while turning for a gentler turn, or hold down for a sharper turn. This is a little awkward at first but is great when you get use to it. It doesn’t need to be mastered to complete the game but could make the difference in a multiplayer game.
Physics:
Some other racing games available for DS such as Urban GT, previous NFSs and Burnout suffer from jittering and jerkiness in their physics that you’d expect from an early PSX title. Carbon doesn’t. The camera and cars always move very smoothly just like a modern console game. Impressively the game also holds a 60fps despite this clearly sophisticated console-like physics engine even when all the AI and a bunch of traffic cars are visible.
Each car’s physics model is claimed to be based on the characteristics of the cars in the real world. I haven’t driven all the cars in real life so I can’t 100% confirm this (I haven’t driven a Golf GTI yet). All the cars certainly do feel different from one another and also feel as you’d expect them to. The smaller cars such as the golf are easier to get around the bends without the use of power slides, while the bigger more powerful cars are much faster in a straight line but require you to master the tricky power slide to maximise their speed in the bends. The Porsche 911 even feels heavy at the back end, being quite a hand full to master.
Performance mods do make dramatic changes to your car’s handling. It’s a close call between buying a new car or improving an existing car. A fully modded out golf will destroy basic spec cars from higher classes.
Crashes however look canned. When you hit a traffic car you quite often just flip onto your roof and kinda spin and slide around. There doesn’t look like any sort of physics is happening at this point at all. It looks like the development team spent the physics budget on the car handling rather than the car crashing and I can’t fault them for that.
Tip: Power sliding is difficult to master. Just tap the powerslide button with just a little tap of left or right to initiate the slide. Don’t hold the powerslide button or hold the direction button as you will loose it end up facing the wrong way. Balance the slide by short taps left and right as needed.
Tip: Nitrous use should be used for accelerating as it doesn’t increase your top speed. Use it coming out of a slow corner or after crashing, keeping an eye on your dash instruments to know how long to use it for.
AI:
The AI is to a good standard and there are no surprises, positive or negative. If you race well, you’ll finish in first and you will have some room to make a mistake now and then. If you make a lot of mistakes you will finish last, a long way last so there doesn’t seem to be any ‘rubber banding’ during the race. It is said that the game adjusts its difficulty based on previous race results and this does seem to be the case. When I lost a race, I would usually win on my second attempt, and looking at the lap time differences, the AI is slightly slower during the second race. The difficulty increases when you’re winning, and decreases when you’re loosing making the AI balance to each individual player’s abilities.
Wingmen when used are reasonably successful. They will always be just behind you no matter how fast or slow you drive meaning they’re always ready to jump into action when you trigger them. The attacker will overtake you and try and ram an opposition off the road, while a drafter will overtake and drive the racing line in front of you allowing you to recharge you nitrous slow mo and rewind abilities if you can slipstream him. They can hinder you sometimes by actually crashing into you when they try to overtake you. They also count in the race positions, so if you use your attacker just before the finish line to take out the car in first place, you might find that you finish third instead of second. Same holds true for the drafter, don’t use him in the later part of your final lap.
Tip: If continuously loosing a race, don’t just keep restarting mid race, as this doesn’t appear to affect the difficulty of the AI. Race to the end and then retry, it’ll be a little easier then.
Graphics:
The graphics are pretty stunning. The sense of speed from the constant 60fps and motion blur is great; this is further enhanced when you use your nitrous, giving a shaking tunnel vision effect where the cars and track stretch away. Sparks look nice especially if you’re looking in your wing mirror and scrape another car or barrier. Cars look good with great detail. You can clearly tell what each car is, and you can also clearly see the mods you’ve bought for your car in game. Car lighting is great; driving under streetlights does change the lighting on your car. This makes the cars feel part of the environment which the previous version failed dismally at.
Tip: When playing on a DS Lite, turn off ‘High Contrast’ in the options. The graphics are sharper and it removes some distortion that can be seen. I imagine ‘High Contrast’ is for a regular DS which has a much darker backlight and is hard to play with it disabled.
Sound:
Sound is nothing special. Sound effects are in stereo and pitch bend as expected. You get traffic cars beeping their horn at you drive by and a whoosh when experiencing a near miss with another car or a wall. Engines for each car do sound different with the masculine V12s sounding much beefier than the **** Inline 4’s. Music is thankfully proper licensed tracks and if it’s to your taste then great, if it’s not then tough.
Tracks:
There are 12 different tracks in the game. Each track is raced forwards and backwards. There are also 3 sprint sections on each track which can also be raced forwards or backwards. That’s 96 different ways of racing the tracks, giving this game a lot of playability, especially in multiplayer. The earlier tracks are pretty easy but they do get much more technical later on, especially when racing them with faster cars. Some tracks are clearly taken from previous console NFS titles which is a great advantage if you know them. There are also short cuts that can be taken to gain advantages. The AI also know the short cuts and will take them.
Career:
The career mode isn’t completely linear. The story is told via 2D, comic book style, animated stills (if that makes sense) with speech bubbles. There are six zones to conquer and each zone contains a number of races. When you complete a zone, the next zone is unlocked but you can complete the races in the zone in any order. Each zone contains a sub boss and boss race. Beating the boss unlocks him as a wingman and completes the zone. You earn money for completing races which you can use to buy a new car for your garage or modify any of your current cars.
Customisation:
There are of course all the usual performance and visual mods you can make to your car, and different cars have different numbers of mods. All cars have 4 tiers of performance modes, but different cars have different numbers of body kits. There are also a large selection of rims and side vinyls although no hood vinyls. You can however design your own side and hood vinyls (which can be mixed and matched with the built in vinyls). The editor allows you to see the vinyl being drawn on your car as you draw it which is pretty cool. The side vinyls are mirrored though, so drawing letters or words appear fine on the left hand side, but are inverted and read backwards on the right hand side.
The dashboard on the sub screen can also be configured to how you want it. It has three different skins, and then the placing the speedo, tacho, sat nav, stereo and other components are as you feel like it. There are also many different types of each component, speedos for instance range from analogue needles and discs to digital dot matrix to lcd displays.
Multiplayer:
This game is 2-4 players but not over the internet. Local wifi in the form of single and multi cart are supported. The single cart is unfortunately limited to only one car and one track, but multi cart has no such limitations. You can race with any cars that you’ve unlocked from career and any car you’ve bought in your garage. If you pick a car you’ve unlocked but you haven’t bought, you will only get the base version of that car. If you do own the car, you can race the car at the spec it is in the garage. You can also race with any of the single player race modes, giving surprisingly lots of value to the multiplayer mode.
Overall:
A solid racing game, by far the best non-Mario racing game on DS by a long way. The racing experience is satisfying and controls are responsive. Besides the modding, the addition of other gameplay features which are unlocked as your career progresses keeps the game fresh. Graphics are smooth and the tracks and cars look great. Carbon is easy to pick up and play for 3 minutes or 3 hours with good multi cart play making this a game you’ll carry with your DS when out and about.