Double Labor day Weekend Review Madness: Altitude and Need for speed : World

After being fed up with EA harassing me through E-mails to try this game again, I decided to give in and give it a whirl. As you probably all know, this is my a millionth review of a NFS title, and you can probably expect rage about how good "THE OLDER GAMES" were.


Need for Speed : World
My first surprise: there isn't a honda civic in sight in this game.

+ It's "Free"!
Between this and Battlefield : Heroes, EA seems to be going on a Freeing spree for new versions of really old games by them. This game is mostly free. There are certain things that you can obtain with actually paying for the game, like a refill on powerups and some special car rentals. Of course,most of the car rentals you can get for an actual ownership rather than renting by just grinding for ingame money, and the powerups are randomly dropped at the end of races. So it kinda takes out the purpose of paying for the game, unless you REALLY want to play as a Pizza delivery car.

+The Police AI is back from Most Wanted.
Okay, I didn't hate Most Wanted. Yes, the car selection was crap, Yes, the vehicle physics were ridiculous, but the police chases were amazingly good in it. The sheer scale of the police chases made police chases was actually pretty scary. The AI is back, and this time the cop cars have gotten a little faster. The lowest of low police cars is a Dodge Charger police car (Not a Caprice like in Most Wanted), and they can keep up really well. When there's 10 of them behind you? They ALL can keep up, and it's pretty frightening and exciting.

= It's an MMO, you know what that means!
It's MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER. This can be both good or bad. I really hate online racing games. Being Anonymous means you can be as much a fucking prick you want on the race track, and anyone who's been rammed off the road in a racing game knows how rage-tastic it is. It's rare to see any type of prevention from ramming or spinning in an online racing game. Predicting this, Need for Speed also has single-player races, which unfortunately don't cough up nearly as much money as the online races do. So you'll be enjoying all the fun of getting rammed off road whether you want to or not.

=Homey G Customizations if you're down for that sorta whack, yo
The car customization is really goddamn big. You can stick somewhere around 60 symbols on your car. Obviously being "BABY FRIENDLYY" you can't use letters. I myself decided to opt for a Police car scheme on my car because I thought it would be ironic when I get chased by the cops (See above). It's fun to mess with and you could probably spend an hour or two trying to make your car look like the General Lee or Herbie or something. However, most of the cool symbols and pictures you don't unlock until about level 20 (Easily 12 hours of playing right there getting to level 20)

-Mario Kart Syndrome
There are powerups. Really? I feel like I'm watching one of my favorite series degrade more and more. The powerups aren't too bad with the exception of something called "Traffic Magnet" which immediately cripples the leader to the point that they can end up in dead last. On top of that, Need for Speed : World isn't nearly the racing simulation that the older games were. You can get through 99% of the corners at full speed without slowing down in the slightest, and even if you don't slow down for the actually difficult corners you can still usually make it through with nothing but a paint scratch or two.

-Gets Repetitive
Although there are a lot of tracks, it all takes place in the same boring city. On top of that, most people only race online in the smaller tracks that you unlock at the beginning of the game because the most people are there and therefore the easiest way to make money. So you'll be playing the same four or five tracks in the beginning chunk of city because everyone else is there. Despite the police chases, it's pretty much going to be the same game over and over.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAND?:
It's not that bad, infact I might play around with it a few more times before moving on to something else. The game is fun to play for an hour or two a week. Just don't play it two long or you might catch some sort of disease.

Moving on, me and my friends had the chance to check out an indie game called Altitude which was free on steam this weekend. We went in knowing pretty much nothing about it, and didn't actually hate it. It's a 2D dogfighting game that features a series of minigames to play with. All in all, it's actually a really fun little indie.

Altitude

That biplane on the right has the best name that passes the swear filter ever in this game.

+Plenty of Gamemodes, maps
Classic gamemodes like Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch make an appearance, as well as a backwards CTF where you have to bomb the enemy base with special bombs that spawn either at your base or the center of the map, all while defending your own base. There are 1-life Team Deathmatches and 1-life Base Destruction modes as well. There's also a unique Plane-ball gamemode which requires you to use a "ball" and shoot it into the enemies' goal. The maps are all cartoony and charming and all that good stuff, and can be gameplay-changing.

+Art-Style that is fun for all ages (Both of people and of computers)
[s]Sorry Travis, it doesn't run on linux.[/s](nvm it does, steam lied to me) However, it will run on almost anything running Windows XP or 7. As long as you have a 1 Ghz processor you can run the game. Despite this, the graphics look pretty nice considering it's supposed to be cartoony and 2D. It's all kid-friendly and happy.



=To unlock everything you have to actually play
You rank up to unlock new planes, weapons and stuff. It works, but to get all the good weapons you have to do a lot more than one free weekends' worth of playing. This is okay, it encourages you to actually buy the game, but it means that you will get screwed pretty bad in the beginning levels when you start with the fastest plane in the game and have no idea how to fly it.

=Achievements are crap
This isn't really a complaint- most of the games I play don't even have achievements. However, these achievements can all be gotten by playing the game the way it's intended. In games like Team Fortress 2, you can get achievements for doing unique and creative things that aren't just "Kill 3 people". So there's a lacking sense of "Achievement".

-Probably not worth $10
This is pretty much the only complaint I could think of. It's a small game, not a huge whopping of content. This isn't a game that's intended to be played all weekend, this is a game that you play maybe an hour or two a week to kill a bit of time. There's only about five planes, and maybe 6 unique weapons and perks among all of them. So don't play it too often or you'll get bored very fast.

Survey Says:
A time killer, not an all-weekend-grind type of game. If you can pick it up during a Steam sale you probably won't regret it.

You forgot to add sigfig's bullshit half-field shot as a minus of Altitude.

AIM, DON'T COMPLAIN
you forgot to add duo's bullshit garbage truck as a negative point

And I suppose that my rear cannon of justice is also bullshit?

no, shitting bullet's is fair
it's shitting mines that float in the air forever and instantly stall you that's bullshit

also huge collision mesh for ball_football doesn't help unless goalie in which case is balanced