November 1, 2006 - EA's seminal racing series has revved its way to the PSP once again with Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City. For the first time, the series hits Sony's portable system with a truly open city to cruise around and race in. Toss in crew members that act as your wingmen during races, some new race types and a bit of spice here and there and you have what sounds like the makings of an all-new experience.
However, Own the City doesn't feel all that new. In fact, it feels like the exact same game of Need for Speed that we've been playing for a few years with a couple new, and mostly minor, features added in.
The series' physics system hasn't changed much in a long time, and it's yet again remained the same in Own the City. Cars feel both agile and loose at the same time with a very arcade-heavy tilt towards the controls. The biggest issue here is that individual cars still don't feel all that different. Of course, they vary in speed, acceleration and handling, but one car that's been modded to have the same stats as another will pretty much feel exactly the same. All this means is that it feels like you're driving stats rather than cars.
The reason we think EA hasn't messed with this design is that it indeed can be fun to fly down highways at insane speeds and quickly wind around slow turns. It's not that the driving mechanics are broken in any way - they're quite responsive, quick and fairly well refined - but the formula hasn't changed in forever, and there really should have been more variance by now.
The track design is, once again, classic Need for Speed architecture. Roads are generally extremely wide and twist and turn slowly, allowing you to floor the pedal throughout most races. There are of course some back alleys and such that'll require that you tap on the brakes here and there, but for the most part it's the same wide-open, and frankly boring, track design we've seen for years.
The game's story is focused around the death of your brother, the leader of a racing crew called the Lucky 7s. After his mysterious death, other crews took over the various districts of the city, so it's up to you to take these areas back in order to find out what happened to your brother.
This setup sounds somewhat different than what we saw in last year's Most Wanted and its wanted list of racers, but in practice it's almost exactly the same. You have to take over each district in a pre-designated order, and complete a number of smaller races in order to convince the leader to race you. So really, it's exactly the same cake as last year, but with differently colored icing.
Own the City's open world works quite well in a strictly technical manner, never hitching to load an area and running smoothly at most every turn. But while it works, that doesn't mean it's fun. There's barely any traffic at all in the game, almost to the point that when you see a car it's a common thought to think, "Oh yeah, there's traffic in this game." As well, there really isn't much to see. The surrounding city isn't all that exciting, and while you can search out hidden crates and such, it just feels tedious to do so. It's much better to simply pause the game and choose your next race from the menu. In this way, the open city doesn't actually hurt the game any, but it feels pointless when you'll always just skip to the menu to progress.
The game's wingmen aspect is pretty decent and winds up being the best new addition to the series. That's not to say that we'd be overly dismayed if the feature didn't return next year, but it's interesting. At any one time, you can have two wingmen that can act as an assassin, brawler or drafter. The assassin will drop spikes just ahead of an opponent, the brawler will simply pummel them out of the race for a bit and the drafter will race ahead of you and allow you to use their draft to increase your speed. Unfortunately, they don't really do anything on their own and will always hang back behind you, but they do work reasonably well as aces up your sleeve when you need
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