You ready to make it into the street racing elite? Need for Speed: Heat is the newest game in the NFS series, coming out in 2019. Settling down in Palm City, you must work during the day to earn that sweet dosh so you can upgrade your cars for the intense street races of the night. Build up your reputation as the best racer out there to gain access to bigger scores and better parts, but be ready, the cops will be waiting around every corner to take you down.
Need for Speed: Heat is a really incredible looking game. The lights and city are gorgeous, especially at night. The game can definitely run, but due to some limitations, there are some pretty heavy caveats here. The first is this uses Origin. As an EA game, you need to have an internet connection to start it up and go through a third party launcher, which is always a bummer. It is also noted that the singleplayer gameplay actually requires an internet connection too. Luckily, you can disconnect from internet while the game is running and still play though.
The game also does have some CPU limitations, which means no matter what settings are changed, there will be a bottleneck. I found that having a medium preset with TDP at 8 gave a decent 30 FPS which felt pretty great. It did still have some dips, but I felt these weren't as bad. Due to the 30 lock, dips really didn't feel impactful. It is a little bit of a shame Heat doesn't play better, and I am not a fan of needing an internet connection for a portable game, but at least you can disconnect once a game is booted up.
Even though it is a small change, it does help with stability, which the game needs as much as possible.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Need for Speed: Heat is a beautiful game with a great gameplay loop, but due to the Internet limits of Origin and the game itself, there are some pretty big compromises to make.
I had this game running offline when all I had to worry about was origin. Now I'm not sure if the same trick will work with the new ea launcher. Putting the deck in offline mode while connected to internet allowed you to sign in manually. This allowed you to sign in in while offline and continue playing.
Yeah the new EA Play application feels a bit messy in my opinion. There is still a bit we are testing with it when it comes to limitations, but we will test it a bit more ourselves.
Is it big difference 1152x720 vs native 1280x800?
When in terms of performance, we noticed a bit of a difference with little change to visuals on the smaller screen. It really helps with stability and battery drain!
This game killed something internal on my deck, still waiting in support.
Killed something internal? What happened??
That I would also like to know as I've just installed it.