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Need For Speed Mobile really is a full-fledged open world racing game on mobile, and I’m obsessed

4K View2023-12-08

Need for Speed™ Mobile

8.6

Fast-pacedRacingMultiplayer

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SHOULD I PLAY NEED FOR SPEED MOBILE?

Short answer: Yeah. Somehow, EA is putting a whole-ass open-world racing game in your phone, and it’s actually pretty damn good. I have my complaints with a couple of the design choices, but from what I’ve played, Need For Speed Mobile is a full-size arcade racing game, and better than anything else I’ve played on mobile in this genre.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about three hours of the Need For Speed Mobile beta, and I’ve split my time between story missions, open-world exploration, and jumping into Hot Pursuit events when it strikes my fancy. I’ve collected a few new cars and gotten going on some upgrades, but there’s a long track ahead of me toward getting any of them maxed out. I’ve competed in seven race events, done a couple odd jobs, and basically just had myself a good old time driving around Heat Bay at top speed.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT NEED FOR SPEED MOBILE?

• Open-world racing, on my phone?! As many times as I read that’s what Need For Speed Mobile was, it still surprised me to be truly set loose in Heat Bay to just drive around. It’s a remarkably beautiful setting, and I was dazzled as long as I kept moving at the high speeds the game intended (more on that a little later). After I finished an event, I could pull up the garage in the menu, but I could also drive over if I wanted to practice my boosts and handbrake turns. Alternatively, I could always head out and look for exploration stars in and around the city. There’s an impressive amount of stuff to do, and the list only got bigger as I progressed through the story.

• Races are just the right length. One of the things I complained about in my Racing Master first impressions was that I felt the races were too brief; they seemed like partial events rather than full races a lot of the time. That’s not the case in Need For Speed Mobile: Races took place in the open world (although they were instanced to allow for scripted events). None of them overstayed their welcome, but they were substantial enough to make me feel like I’d actually won something when I made it to the podium.

• It’s gorgeous. I was genuinely impressed with how good everything looked in Need For Speed Mobile. The cars, the characters, the city itself—heck, even the goofy little effects that popped off when I combo-ignited my nitro tanks managed to look slick. It’s an impressive, premium-looking game from any angle, even if it was easier to see the simple textures and geometry when I was stopped.

• There’s real challenge and mastery to be found. As we’ll discuss momentarily, Need For Speed Mobile is built around a touchscreen UI that I wasn’t a huge fan of, but putting that aside, I still felt drawn in by the desire to master the system and improve my driving skills in each of my cars. Pulling off a perfect U-turn drift felt awesome, and as soon as I made it happen once I was determined to get good enough to perform the maneuver correctly every time.

• Hot pursuit. After the first couple of story missions, Hot Pursuit mode opens up. Need For Speed series vets will recognize this mode: It’s about building up heat by winning street races, evading the police and disabling their cars, and escaping the long arm of the law. Once you hit a certain experience level, you can actually play as the police and chase down players. I had a lot of fun with this mode, even though the arcadey car vs. car mechanics were pretty silly—energy shields and EMP blasts, goofy nonsense like that.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN NEED FOR SPEED MOBILE?

• Acceleration is terrible. In Need For Speed Mobile, you are either accelerating or braking. As soon as I tapped the gas, my driver would simply floor it and keep it there. That’s just not how any car or, for that matter, any racing game has ever worked! I understood why the system is set up this way: It frees up the right thumb for the handbrake and nitro buttons. The problem is, it made maneuvering around the city a major bummer, because I couldn’t perform simple, small movements with my cars. It was always either pedal-to-the-metal, nitro, or brakes. What I would have preferred was a system that let off the accelerator when I lifted my thumb, possibly moving the nitro button over to the left side above the steering controls.

• It’s grindy. Like every free-to-play game nowadays, Need For Speed Mobile has a gacha system in it, and the pulls I got from it were pretty dull—mostly duplicate cosmetics like a metallic black paint job or a low-end spoiler. I didn’t really mind this all that much though, because simply playing the game was a ton of fun. I was content to let my materials and gacha tickets pile up passively while I amused myself out on the roads.