Game Details
- Publisher: Dusenberry Martin Racing
- Developer: Monster Games
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Racing
- Pros: Pack racing is surprisingly comfortable
- Cons: Very bare bones; so-so presentation; you have to unlock tracks!; few options; bumper cars gameplay
- MSRP: $60
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. NASCAR Heat Evolution was supposed to be a
new NASCAR game made by people who actually claim to give a crap about the
sport and wanted to do right by fans, so why does it feel like an unfinished
half-assed cash grab? The presentation
is last-gen, it is bare bones in terms of features and options, the gameplay is
totally mediocre, and yet it costs $60 and has a bunch of paid DLC
already. NASCAR Heat Evolution is a
mess from top to bottom.
The problems with NASCAR Heat Evolution begin with an
incredibly sparse feature set. Just
like the last several NASCAR titles, NASCAR Heat Evolution only has the
top-tier Sprint Cup series. No XFINITY,
no Craftsman Truck. Just Sprint
Cup. Remember EA’s NASCAR titles that
had all of the national series? Boy,
those were the good ol’ days. NASCAR
Heat Evolution does have all of the Sprint Cup teams and drivers, and even a
handful of XFINITY drivers, and most of the sponsors are in place minus the
alcohol sponsors. It is kind of funny
to see Brad Keselowski drive around with a car that just says “Brad” on it,
though, as that matches his “Me First” attitude fairly hilariously perfectly.
The modes include a quick race mode, challenges where you
must match real accomplishments from the real drivers, a season mode (with
different length options), a career mode, and online multiplayer. In a completely stupid move, however, you have
to unlock most of the tracks in the quick race mode via an XP / level system
and unlocking all 23 tracks takes a surprisingly long time. It took me around 35 races or so spread
around the different modes just to unlock everything, which kinda sucks since
you have to play on the same tracks over and over again.
The career mode deserves a mention because it is incredibly
grindy and not especially fun. You
start off as a nothing team with no sponsors and bad equipment and have to earn
a pittance finishing at the back of the field every race in order to save up
enough money to start buying team upgrades so you can compete. Your car literally isn’t fast enough to keep
up and turns like a brick, so you spend most of the your first full season
finishing between 30-40th.
Things do start to get a little better when you can upgrade your shop
and get engine specialists and the like who will actually make your car
competitive, but it takes a long, long time and a lot of frustrating racing in
the back before that happens.
All of this wouldn’t be so bad, I suppose, if the racing out
on the track was any good, but it isn’t.
There are only two handling modes – normal and simulation – where normal
is essentially NASCAR bumper cars where it is almost impossible to crash, and
simulation is also still bumper cars but you also occasionally lose control and
spin out randomly because there is no traction control. Unlike past games, there are virtually no
options for tuning the game experience to suit your skill level. All you can really do is change the handling
mode and A.I. difficulty but neither seems to make much difference. Either way it’s all just bumper cars. It is a shame that there aren’t more options
so you can select more of a sim or arcade experience. There actually are some mechanical tuning options to tune your
car’s performance, but they’re buried in a maze of menus.
There is no consistency to the physics at all and you can
re-create the same incident ten times and get ten different results. Sometimes you can slam into a car’s rear
quarter panel intentionally to wreck them and nothing happens. They don’t budge an inch. Other times you’ll barely touch someone
square in the back, which shouldn’t really do anything, and send them
spinning. There is no consistency in
how the cars react to each other, which makes playing in simulation mode simply
infuriating.
Regardless of the handling mode you choose, the game plays
pretty much the same. Strangely, the
game is very, very consistent when it comes to finishing order for the A.I..
I’ve run dozens of races and a few things are guaranteed – Either Jimmie
Johnson or Brad K will win the race, the Gibbs cars are always slotted in from
9-12, Dale Jr. is always in the top 10, and Danica is always 17th,
just to give a few examples. It makes
the races really quite boring when the A.I. drivers are always in the same
positions in almost every single race.
I will say, however, that despite the broken physics, bumper
car gameplay, and wonky A.I., NASCAR Heat Evolution can still be sort of fun to
play. My guilty pleasure in the last
few NASCAR games has been to intentionally start at the back and see if I can
win in the fewest amount of laps and NASCAR Heat Evolution definitely lets me
do that. The A.I. cars actually use
multiple lines instead of just staying in one big two-lane pack the whole race,
which makes weaving through them surprisingly enjoyable. I also have to admit that your car is very
stable while racing in a pack, even at Daytona and Talladega. You feel really comfortable driving mere
inches away from other cars, which is something I haven’t really ever felt in a
NASCAR game before. Part of why you
feel so comfortable is because this game is basically bumper cars and not in
any way shape or form a simulation, but that can still be fun for a while!
One of the most surprising things you’ll notice when you start
NASCAR Heat Evolution is the little Unity logo on the start screen. Yeah, someone thought it was a good idea to
make a racing game in Unity. As with
most Unity games, that means NASCAR Heat Evolution only looks OK and runs like
a pig. The game simply doesn’t look
like a current-gen title and NASCAR Heat Evolution’s framerate fluctuates
wildly, usually getting worse as the race goes on.
Something that is kind of crazy to me is that there isn’t a
photo mode or replays after a race and you can’t even move the camera around
during the race to look around or behind you.
It is like they knew it wasn’t too pretty and did everything they could
to make sure you can’t actually take a good look at it. Speaking of the camera, the three available
camera angles – cockpit, on the hood, and behind the car – are all too close
and too low and make it hard to actually see where you’re going.
The bottom line to all of this is that NASCAR Heat Evolution
doesn’t seem like a finished product.
The menus are simple and ugly.
Some of the trivia facts on the loading screens aren’t finished and just
end mid-sentence. It is missing
features and modes and options that have become standard in racing titles,
particularly racing titles that want to simulate a real world sport. The graphics are bland and blurry and not
current-gen at all. And biggest of all,
the gameplay is a major step back from the Eutechnyx games in almost every
way. A little more time in the oven
wouldn’t have fixed everything, but it certainly would have helped. As it stands, NASCAR Heat Evolution is a
major, major disappointment that I can’t recommend to even the biggest NASCAR
fans.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
