In theory, NFS Rivals sounds awesome. Take the frantic combat of 2010's great Hot Pursuit and combine it with the open world of something like Burnout Paradise and you have a recipe for success. Add in parallel cop and racer careers and a Dark-Souls-esque risk-reward mechanic for racers where you must survive to retain hard earned points and you have something potentially very special. Sadly Need for Speed Rivals is full of horrific rubber-band AI, useless multiplayer features that are turned on by default, and some of the worst technical issues to plague a PC port since 2011's disastrous RAGE. Add in the fact that the developers have abandoned the PC version without resolving any of the key problems and you have a game that you should steer well clear of if you intend to purchase the PC version.
The problems become apparent from the get-go. Races are categorized by difficulty, and one would logically assume that progressing into the career would allow you to better tackle the more difficult races that offer greater rewards. Sadly this is not the case, as the difficulty is geared to be the same no matter what you are driving. The AI will ALWAYS drive at roughly the same speed as you, somehow speeding ahead when you are going as fast as possible and slowing down to wait when you run into problems. Rubber-band AI has often been an issue in racing games, but here it is taken to such a ridiculous level that progression through the career mode feels empty and useless. This absurd AI behaviour comes into play in any event that involves racing against AI, fleeing from the cops or trying to chase down and bust AI racers.
On top of this farcical rubber-band AI, the game is laden with glitches. On many occasions the game broke in spectacular ways, with AI racers crashing and simply remaining stationary despite their cars being at near perfect health. Another time, my car would instantly jump to the "Damage Critical" stage as soon as I touched another object, no matter how many times I returned to command stations or drove through repair stations.
The multiplayer aspect of Rivals is severely underdeveloped if playing with strangers; you constantly share the world with five other players, but interaction is minimal. You might get into a police chase with another human player, but due to the size of the map, you usually don't run into them when playing with strangers. Instead, you will be treated to game-disconnects in the middle of races and the inability to pause the game at any time.
These are all problems with the game itself, but even worse are the PC-specific issues. The geniuses at Ghost-Games made one of the stupidest mistakes in the PC-development book: tied the speed of the game to the frame rate. The game is locked at default to a miserable 30fps. While a fix exists to force the game to run at 60, the poor optimization means that it will often fall below that, resulting in slow-motion gameplay. It has been months since an update has been released for the game, and it seems unlikely one will ever arrive.
While there are fun moments in Rivals with high-speed pursuits and vehicular combat, the game also represents a massive middle finger to the PC user base. Rivals is an incredibly lazy sequel that takes a good concept and destroys it with straight up lousy execution.