My Review: NFS: Underground 2 Drag Racing Event Clone? Seriously?

[MrDeviance]

Is this the best you could do Stainless? Game runs slow as hell on my galaxy s7 edge and it barely even connects online after errors and retries.

How is this game in any way related to the carmageddon series? Just the sfx and the car models?

Why does anybody even care about the crash at the ending, which is scripted as hell.

Very disappointed in you guys. Looks like you didn't learn a thing from the laggy and buggy mess that was the release of Reincarnation and you went on and repeated the same debacle.

However this time, even if the game would have ran perfect, it's just an uninspired Need for Speed: Underground 2 Drag Racing ripoff.

I usually have patience with these things but even I felt the urgent need to uninstall it 10 minutes after experimenting with it.

The game feels like you just quit making it halfway and just released it in prealpha.. It feels like a buggy, laggy, uninspired mess to the nth degree.

Sorry if it saddens you but this is my honest review for it.

I am under the impression that Stainless is in great need of some young new minds with some fresh innovative thinking and it also needs to lay off some of the horrible coders that were able to create such a slow game in Unity.

I have never seen an Unity based game run as slow as this...

I give it a 2/10, it's a complete failure.

[CzechDeath]

how is CC ripoff of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXDHfW-MCMU

[AlexTSK]

Well it is quite similar to other mobile drag racing games out there from what I've seen, other than the crash at the end that is.

I think what people are getting their panties in a twist for is that this game is clearly not made for the fans of the original series.

This is just my opinion of course so take it with a pinch of salt but I feel like this game was specifically made to target people that don't know about carmageddon. i really feel like I'm not the demographic for this type of game and therefore feel there's no point in bitching about it. Whether its a good game or not I can't weigh in as i don't have a device that can run it.

[Psyrgery]

Like 80-90% of mobile racing games are about drag racing.

You just didn't know until now.

And the destruction and graphics aren't bad if we take into account that the game is running in mobile hardware.

[Trent]

Like Psyrgery said, drag racing is an extremely popular genre on mobile. CSR2 is the top grossing racing game on iOS (while CSR1 is also still in the top 10!), the 19th highest grossing game and 31st highest grossing app overall.

Stainless' choice to make a Carma game in that genre is obviously nothing to do with NSFU but entirely based on the genre's popularity and, to be fair, their take on it does have quite a good spin and flavour.

It's also very much feels like the pitch of "young new minds" trying to bring "innovative thinking" to the franchise to modernise it for today's mobile audience who may not be familiar with Carmageddon. Obviously this is a game to reach a new audience and not to satiate the appetites of the hardcore fans.

It's not like the "old haggard minds" who just wanted to make more classic Carma gameplay would have thought "I know what will make out existing audience happy! A free-to-play mobile drag racing game!" Definitely looks like it's designed by new blood aiming at a new market. Can't really blame them for trying to reach new audience with it, though, given how small the existing carmageddon audience is and how little non-fans cared about Reincarnation/Max Damage regardless of the technical issues.

And, eh, spending 10 minutes on the game then rage quitting is hardly giving it a fair shot. I've got no idea about android but I've not had any technical issues on my iPhone 6 and haven't noticed any performance issues with the exception of pauses between menus while it polls the servers. To me it seems a solid entry in the genre, im not much of a fan of the genre but it makes a good 5 minute distraction every now and again. Clearly it's not for everyone and it's obviously not breaking brand new ground, but it's certainly a fresh approach to a genre which is extremely popular at the moment and has a lot of potential income. I'd prefer a proper Carma game but I'd be well happy if this makes them the money to keep the franchise alive.

[MrDeviance]

And, eh, spending 10 minutes on the game then rage quitting is hardly giving it a fair shot. I've got no idea about android but I've not had any technical issues on my iPhone 6 and haven't noticed any performance issues with the exception of pauses between menus while it polls the servers. To me it seems a solid entry in the genre, im not much of a fan of the genre but it makes a good 5 minute distraction every now and again. Clearly it's not for everyone and it's obviously not breaking brand new ground, but it's certainly a fresh approach to a genre which is extremely popular at the moment and has a lot of potential income. I'd prefer a proper Carma game but I'd be well happy if this makes them the money to keep the franchise alive.

I've spent 10 minutes on it because it was dull, repetitive, boring but the biggest reason of them all was the 15-20 fps that I constantly got on it on a galaxy s7 edge which is a very expensive phone and a top tier one behind galaxy s8.

If such phones can't run the game then they are really fucking selective, aren't they?

As for it running perfectly on apple devices, I have no doubt they do considering how the apple environment is and how there is only a handful of phone models to optimize for, whereas for android there are hundreds or thousands.

The problem however remains that I do not own just any shitty android phone and I expected at least a high end extremely well known and respected device such as the galaxy s7 edge to run it at 60fps at least...

[Trent]

Like you said, there's thousands of android devices with dozens of different SoCs with hundreds of different performance profiles, getting a game to perform right on all of them isn't easy. Even just taking the S7 Edge, that phone is sold with two very different chips in it with different performance characteristics. Games might run fine on the Exynos variation but not the Snapdragon or vice versa.

I have heard a lot of complaints from people developing games for Android that the S7 Edge gets worse performance than low spec phones and the culprit usually seems to be the native 1440p resolution being used by default instead of dropping to a more sensible 1080p which the GPU can actually handle. This is apparently a very significant problem in games with lots of alpha blending and overdraw, such as when lots of transparent particles take up a lot of screen, much like Crashers. You'd expect a high end well known device to have decent performance without having to worry about it defaulting to stupidly high resolutions but then again you'd also expect them not to explode, but such is the Samsung way ;)

On the fact you find it dull and boring, that's not a mark on it being a bad game, it's just not a genre for you. Like I said, it's a very popular genre on mobile so clearly the game's target audience don't think they are dull and boring.

[MrDeviance]

Like you said, there's thousands of android devices with dozens of different SoCs with hundreds of different performance profiles, getting a game to perform right on all of them isn't easy. Even just taking the S7 Edge, that phone is sold with two very different chips in it with different performance characteristics. Games might run fine on the Exynos variation but not the Snapdragon or vice versa.

I have heard a lot of complaints from people developing games for Android that the S7 Edge gets worse performance than low spec phones and the culprit usually seems to be the native 1440p resolution being used by default instead of dropping to a more sensible 1080p which the GPU can actually handle. This is apparently a very significant problem in games with lots of alpha blending and overdraw, such as when lots of transparent particles take up a lot of screen, much like Crashers. You'd expect a high end well known device to have decent performance without having to worry about it defaulting to stupidly high resolutions but then again you'd also expect them not to explode, but such is the Samsung way ;)

On the fact you find it dull and boring, that's not a mark on it being a bad game, it's just not a genre for you. Like I said, it's a very popular genre on mobile so clearly the game's target audience don't think they are dull and boring.

Personally, I think the generation of gamers that find this type of racing style cool, are born and raised to accept low standards and embrace them as their highest level of entertainment.

This is a policy to influence new generations to accept and embrace low quality as their default level of high quality.

I guess mass media does not sleep and knows how to combat the rising level of demands from my generation of gamers and media consumers.

So allow me then to grief and say that if such is the new trend for gaming then dull and boring is the whole generation that embraces such mediocre shit.

From a guy that finds Korgoth of Barbaria something that he resonates with, I give this game a 2/10

The furry generation that masturbates to sonic and my little pony cartoons, can give it a 9/10 and masturbate while having kinky fetishes with the eagle's exhaust pipe.

I rest my case.