This new installment in the NFS series doen't use its entire potential, but remains an enjoyable, fun arcade racer.
If in Most Wanted you tried to reach the top of the blacklist, in Carbon you have to conquer Palmont City. The game begins with you entering this new city, after escaping Rockport in Most Wanted. Sgt. Cross from the previous game has become a bounty hunter. He catches you at the beginning of the game, but fortunately Darius, your former business partner, arrives and saves you from jail. In exchange, you'll have to do something for him - namely, conquering the entire city!
It doesn't matter though if you haven't played the previous games, in Carbon you start all over again. While escaping from Cross, your car is totalled and you have to choose between three different types of cars - muscle, exotic and tuner. The choice you will make is very important, as it determines what car parts you will unlock and where you will start. For example, if you choose the muscle car, you may have problems in handling it, but instead you will start in Kempton, the zone with the easiest races and the easiest boss.
Palmont City is divided in four major areas - Kempton, Downtown, Fortuna and Silverton - each split in several smaller areas. Each territory is owned by a certain racing crew. In order to obtain a territory, you need to complete at least 2 out of 3 races on that territory. There are four major racing crews in Palmont - TFK, Bushido, 21st Street and Stacked Deck - as well as several minor crews. Initially, each minor crew has a certain area in control, but pretty fast, the major crews will obtain full control on their nearby territories. From then, the minor crews will start bugging you and other crews with defence races. When you enter the turf of a rival crew, you may get challenged by a member of that crew. You can choose where the finish line is. If you win, you get a cash reward. However, near the end of the game, you will be challenged even more often, which is at least bizarre, since you technically control the entire city.
But until winning the city and ending the career mode, you will have to gain reputation by winning more and more races. The more races you win, the more new events will be unlocked. There are several types of races - circuit, sprint, speedtrap (get high speeds in certain points of the track), checkpoint, drift, canyon sprint (easiest type of canyon races, because you don't have to think about falling off the cliff), canyon checkpoint, canyon drift and canyon duels. In drift events , you score points by drifting your car at corners. The faster you drift, the more points you achieve. Hitting walls ends your drift, which is pretty frustrating when you are pulling out big combos. Drifting works slightly different from the previous installments, but not better. Sometimes the hitting walls sensor is either too sensitive or too insensible. Especially the canyon drifts leave no room for error. The real problem with drifts though is that trying to avoid hitting walls is the harest thing to do. Using NOS and staying in the bonus zone is a certified recipe for victory, if you manage to avoid walls.
Don't worry though if you don't master drifting. You will never encounter more than one drift event in a territory, which means you can easily win the game without even trying drift events. Since the streets of Palmont aren't proper for drags, drag events are no longer part of this Need for Speed game, which is certainly good news for those who never managed to learn how to switch gears. However, to beat Carbon, you need to master canyon races. By far the most frustrating races from Carbon, canyon duels are usually part of boss races, but can also be seen as normal events in Silverton. Set in canyon serpentines near Palmont, canyon duels consist of two runs; in the first run, your opponent is in front and you have to stay close to him and put pressure on him. The closer you are, the more points you will achieve. In the second run, you are the leader. The boss will try to reduce points from your score, therefor, it's vital to have a big amount of points after the first run. If you run out of points, you lose. You can also lose easily if you are too far from him or if you fall off the cliff (most likely thing to do within those infernal serpentines). If you overtake your opponent in the first run and maintain it for 10 seconds, you automatically win the race. Out of all, the most frustrating factor is the track itself. Otherwise, with some practice, you can easily get close to your opponent. The rest of the game is surprisingly easy, which makes canyon races certainly give you a shock due to their unbalance level of difficulty. Something more than a video tutorial surely would have helped a lot. What the game never mentions is that, if you slam your opponent, instead of getting more points, your score is reduced. If in the second run your opponent hits you, however, you get more points. Utterly ridiculous rules, since the game is supposed to encourage you to put pressure on your opponent. However, the beautiful scenes from the canyon tracks make up for it. The reflections of the lights from the city in the water are certainly beautiful, too bad you never have the time to enjoy the view.
Talking of bosses, they aren't very inspired. Not only that they look 10 times uglier in the game than in the FMVs, but they also have the exact same superior attitude that generates very similar sentences like "I don't know what's more pathetic: your crew or your car" or "You can't even touch me". When you race though, their only worry is distracting you. Whenever you crash, you can be sure your opponent will give a sardonic laughter. At least when you overtake them, they are more original - they either look amazed or jump off the seat shouting "NOOOOO!". These distracting moments are understandable during boss races, but you can also seen them racing with all the other drivers in Silverton and it is plain irritating to notice that the former boss is laughing of your crashes, even though you're in the first place and he's very far away. X-ray vision, mayhaps?...
The attraction of Most Wanted, police pursuits are back in Carbon. Depending on what infractions you've made, your car has a certain heat attached to. On Heat 1, your infractions hardly get noticed, but on Heat 5, the pursuit is getting the looks of a warfare. Spike strips, federal pursuit cars, giant SUVs and tons of headache are serious reasons why you shouldn't try to reach Heat 5 too often. You can escape pursuits by getting out of police's sight or use a Pursuit Breaker. Marked as red triangles on the map, Pursuit Breakers are various traps that, once activated, disable the nearby police cars. Another way to escape pursuits is using Speedbreaker (an equivalent of Bullet Time that slowdowns your car - good for tight routes), but Pursuit Breakers get you out of trouble far easier. Once getting out of their sight, you enter Cooldown mode. Until the pursuit is over, you need to find a Hiding Spot (marked with circles on the map) so that you wouldn't find another police car patrolling and therefor resuming the pursuit. It isn't a big problem on the first heat levels, but afterwards, the Cooldown takes a lot of the time without being in a Hiding Spot. However, if you do get busted, there's nothing to worry much about. Unless you don't have anymore cash to pay fines, you get out of jail in no time, but you should be worried though about your car's impound strikes. After 3 Impound Strikes, your car is permanently lost, but you can get another one or increase the number of Impound Strikes that can be supported with a card you might get from a boss after beating him.
Disabling police cars in Carbon resembles Takedown from the Burnout series. You can disable a police car by giving it a serious slam or several slams in the wall, but Pursuit Breakers are the most efficient way to disable your pursuers. Also, hitting a rig that would release its cargo on the cops is pretty efficient. Each time you disable a police car, a screen shows you the amount you added towards your bounty. Disabling a federal pursuit vehicle gives you much more points than disabling a police car on Heat 1. If you disable a SUV, you can easily get tons of points towards your bounty. Too bad it's irrelevant how much bounty you get, because it's just a number that will appear on the Statistics page in Main Menu, but with no effects on gameplay. The developers could have used bounty to make new modes or even introduce some bounty hunters (like Cross) that would pursue you after getting a certain amount of bounty points, but they haven't done that.
We are talking about a driving game, so it is very important for such a game to have a serious amount of licensed cars. Carbon offers an eclectic collection of around 30 cars, each pair of 10 cars belonging to a certain type of car: muscle, exotic or tuner. Carbon includes models from companies such as Ford, Cadillac, Mazda, Chevrolet, Lamborghini or Porsche, from classic models to luxurious prototypes. Sure, 30 cars is a small number compared to what Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing offer, but Carbon has enough interesting cars for everyone. It is worth trying to unlock the top models such as Lamborghini Murcielago as these are the most performant from their class.
In Carbon there's no way you can win races without customizing your car. A stock car doesn't have important parts such as nitrous, so you'll have to get nitrous as soon as you unlock it, as it often make the difference between victory and defeat. You should also buy more performant packages for car parts such as the engine, as they easily increase your performance. In the first Underground game, you could choose the same car part from several different companies, but the models had no difference in performance. In Carbon, they do, and the driving style can depend on what type of tires you have, for example. There are also three other customizing categories: autosculpt, aftermarket and visuals. Technically, you can radically transform the look of certain car parts using Autosculpt, but you are limited to pre-defined shapes. Also, you will need to have certain crew members hired when you are accessing Autosculpt to have access to those parts. Aftermarket consists of things such as body kits, hoods or spoilers. Within the "Visual" category, you can change the look of your car, your tires, your window tint and you can even change the height of your ride, but unfortunately neons are no longer in Carbon.
Carbon also includes a brand new gameplay mechanism - wingmans. Wingmans are your crew companions that help you during races. There are three types of wingmans - blockers, drafters and scouts. Whenever you want, you can activate them by pressing a certain button. Blockers knockout opponents so that you can take the lead. When activated, drafters leave a blue trace behind their car. If you stay for few seconds in that trace, you can get a significant speed boost. Scouts leave a neon trace for guidance through tight/dark routes and leave green dots on the map when crossing shortcuts. Practically, they find the shortest way around the track. The problem with wingmans is that they're pretty useless. Blockers aren't too efficient towards the end, there are few roads in Palmont that could really be used for drafting and shortcuts are pretty easy to discover, with minor exceptions. Sometimes though, when it's a bit harder to beat a race, they can easily win it for you. However, most of the races don't take more than few tries to beat even without the help of a wingman.
In the previous games, the design of the cities were considered pretty generic, but not the same can be told about Palmont. The city has pretty many distinctive elements, but some of them are inspired from real life cities (for instance, there are many elements in Silverton that resemble Las Vegas). Each division has also a certain heat attached to, depending on how often the police patrols in that area. If the heat of an area is too high, stop racing for a while in it and the heat level will drop. Overall, the city is good looking and the game offers enough interesting graphics. Sure, it takes some while until unlocking Silverton for free roam, but it's definitely worth the effort, as Silverton is by far the most beautiful area out of all.
Along the Career mode, Carbon also offers 32 series of challenges from all types of races, as well as a Quick Race and a Custom Match mode. Too bad the last two modes are exclusively online, which means users that can't have an account on EA Nation are stuck with Career and Challenge Series.
Once the last race is completed, however, you don't feel like you've just conquered an entire city and beat the game. Everything except the canyon races is almost too easy. When you conquer a territory, you don't feel like you've made a huge step to conquering the city. The problem is that everything is a bit too superficial. It takes only few minutes to conquer a territory. Once you conquer it, you unlock a new car (part) and your crew controls it, but you never get a serious benefit out of it.
Like all games from EA, Carbon is delivered with an EA Trax - a customizable soundtrack out of which you can select which song to play and which not. Carbon's EA Trax manages to be surprisingly good. From hip-hop to rock and electro-clash, the soundtrack covers several genres and manages to create a feeling of variety without being just a random mix of licensed tracks. Without a doubt, the soundtrack of Carbon fits perfectly the atmosphere in Palmont, with minor exceptions. It's pretty bad though that EA Trax is only heard during Free Roam, since there is also music especially composed for Carbon that is used in pursuits and most of the races, which isn't bad either, but this time EA Trax actually deserved to be properly used.
After you finish the game, you can try to continue spending time in Free Roam or try completing some more Reward Cars or trying to finish the game using another car class. Also, there are 32 Challenge Series you can try to complete. They are pretty good, but it only lasts for a small amount of time. In the end, Carbon leaves you with a sour taste in the mouth. Yes, it is fun while it lasts. Yes, it is a stylish arcade racer you can easily enjoy. But still, it could have been far better than this.