Recent reviews by Bjourk

Terrible Battlefield clone

This game is garbage.
If The Run didn't kill this franchise, Heat certainly will.
You have two play modes corresponding to day and night. In the day, you earn money but no reputation so you build up a huge quantity of money that you can't spend on anything because it's locked behind level restrictions. You only level up from Reputation, which you can't earn during the day.
At night, you can only earn Reputation and not money. So you level up slowly if you can escape the cops that are spawned in your race so they have to notice you.

So let's talk about cops. First of all, they're all made out to be macho a-holes who have something to prove. This is an egregious fallacy that misrepresents the police. Then, there's the physics. No matter how fast you drive, the cops keep perfect formation or pass you like you're standing still to try to brake check you. Police chases are nearly impossible to escape and are unavoidable at night.

The game has decent graphics when they work. There have been many times when the obnoxious blinding light effects followed my car, completely obscuring the track and making it impossible to continue playing. Hopefully this is a bug but if it is, why isn't it fixed? If it's an intended "feature", it's ridiculous.

The world and the tracks are full of random objects that have no place in the middle of a road. Signs, poles, and other important-looking items litter the middle of traffic lanes. Any civil engineer would be mortified!

Speaking of clutter, as you slowly progress through multiple arrests by murderous cops and many restarts due to lighting bugs, you will unlock more and more random activities that nobody wants to do. Nobody wants to drive around the city of clutter and find random items to steal. They aren't even performance parts or anything else useful. Flamingos? Really? There are "challenges" that pit you against an imaginary opponent's time too. The first one I tried spawned me on a monorail track narrower than my car and expected me to drive along it. Maybe it would be fun if the physics didn't launch my car into the air every time I tried to turn.

The music in the Need for Speed franchise has a history of being pretty good. Well, that ends with this title. While I was driving around this ridiculous environment, I was forced to listen to an equally-ridiculous and embarrassing soundtrack with one or two decent songs sprinkled in. The mumble rap and pop-rap garbage need to go. Along with weird crashing sounds of the industrial pop junk. I'm not anti-rap or anti-electronic music; I just want to hear the good stuff, not this bottom-of-the-barrel embarrassment. I would ask that quality music be reintroduced to the franchise but I wouldn't know if it did because the franchise is dead.

Like the driving physics, the car selection is OK. There are some greats in there but lots of older games have had a much wider selection.

If you're thinking about purchasing this game, I hope this helps you save your money. I would be more upset if I hadn't gotten this game at a heavily-reduced price during a sale.