Need for Speed™ Heat

Absolutely fantastic!!
Haven't played a racing game since NFS Most Wanted years ago but this picks up flawlessly where that left off. The world is simply beautiful, particularly at night, and i've spent hours just motoring around the huge map exploring all the amazing sights. The difficulty is perfectly pitched so that whilst its challenging from the start it never seems impossible....and the police chases....Wow!!
I find the in game story captivating and the character creator lets you tailor your character to your own preferences.
There are two stand out features for me...firstly the car customisation on which i could write pages on but can be summed up as simply being extraordinarily good fun and rewarding. Secondly the online cross platform multiplayer is simply brilliant. its an absolute cinch to join amazing races with other players both during the day and at nightime but for me the most fun is the open world police chases. You can actively assist other players in ridiculously high octane police chases through the city streets and run interference on the pursuing police cars or even slyly sabotage their efforts to escape and engage in hilarious grudge matches with multiple players over a huge area.
I've bought it as a gift for others and they have all loved it. Simply put if you are even remotely considering buying a racing game, or even if you aren't, buy this. I've been gaming for over thirty years and I'd easily consider one of the tiny number of games I consider to be must haves.

《Need for Speed Heat》

和上一代一样也是拥有剧情的赛车游戏，但是这一代的画质真的很漂亮，在雨后天晴的夕阳落照中尽情的飘车，让人感到非常的放松！！！

the graphics are amazing. i really wanted a game to run from police and i thought this must be the best. but the cops appear out of nowhere, they slam into you, other cars, they dont care, theyre faster than you, then they can just suddenly lose you just as fast, theres no sense of a chase. i tried to like this game but its just dull. you have a tiny choice of cars, everything is locked, you can get money but money doesnt do anything without your COOL points or whatever it is. then you can only do certain things in the day and some in the night. ive mainly been playing to try to get to a point that its fun, but ive not got there yet. anyway i might keep trying to get some fun outta this game, for now im gonna play forza

One of the best in the NFS franchise, great graphics, great story, handling and driving, and of course the map, just perfect, 10/10, have replayed, would recommend to anyone that likes open-world racing.

Love the game. The detailed upgrading of the cars is amazing.

Best car game I played my life good Graphics and fun playing with friends

Game is amazing. Great races, cars and soundtack.
HOWEVER....EA launcher ruined the entire experience for me.
Stopped playing it for awhile and after picking it up again it just would not run as it couldn't get pass the EA launcher page.

EA please stop forcing your rubbish launcher app onto us.

fun, vibrant, a lot better than Payback, very overhated soundtrack. the multiplayer got overshadowed by Unbound, which is not surprising

I just finished playing NFS Carbon for the PS2 and decided to give Heat a try. Unfortunately the franchise has gone way down hill. Graphically the game is miles ahead of a 20 year old PS2 game, as should be expected. Unfortunately that's the only area the series has improved. It should also be noted that the character graphics are actually worse, because Carbon used live actors and not just cgi. Heat suffers from the same problem Forza Horizon does, in that the cars and environment look good, but the characters are butt ugly. It's even more jarring than the PS2 which had live action cut scenes, switching to lower quality cgi vehicles. Probably because cars are inanimate and Heat's characters enter the uncanny valley.

Aside from graphics the real meat of the game, the game play and controls, are also some how worse 20 years later. For some reason I can only remap the controls for mouse and keyboard and not for xbox controller. EA has truly earned their current reputation. After half an hour of BS I shut down the game. It just isn't fun. I may try to pick the game up again and give it another shot. If my opinion changes I'll update this review. Glad I bought it when it was 90% off.

Trying to be as charitable as I can, all I can say is at least you can skip the cut scenes, unlike in Forza.

Update: Another 20 minutes in, and I'm uninstalling this trash.

I picked this up for £3 in a steam sale and now I feel bad cause this is the most fun I've had playing a NFS game since Most Wanted and you even get the BMW from that game as a reward in this one. Knowing what I know now I would have happily paid full price for this game it's epic

The city and the game play is good. The cop chases are one of the best of newer racing games. I wish there were a little more cars, but overall the game is awesome. Highly recomend it, aspecialy at a discount.

played this on the xbox, pc, and steam deck. the performance of the game is stellar, good graphics and good frames. i still consider this game better than unbound and the gameplay loop keeps me coming back even after fully completing the game. the missions car selection are great also. i don't remember much of the story so i cant really comment on that. good game overall.

I liked it . To be honest didn't find anything special . The collectibles were hard to find . Now all its left is to get the last trophy "all for one" but yea it was good at a discounted price not worth it in full price .

Really truly garbage racing and AI, all PvE challenge is tied to cheats and special physics rules for AI drivers. Some very beautiful scenery, but crappy-to-mediocre racing.

Also the cop chases kill fun faster than you can say "teleporting cops". The only way it is physically possible to end a cop chase consistently is by using special "items" or going off a jump and having the AI driver mess up and go into a ravine/river.

If you like actually racing cars, go buy any of the other racing games out there, NFS is cooked. If you like looking at rainy cityscapes with bad camera controls, try out Heat (but only if you can get it for $1-$2.

Fast cars and latinas, would reccomend

I havent logged into my EA account for 4 years and finally decide to buy an ea game thought steam. turns out my account has been deleted which means i can never buy any new EA games and all my EA games in my library are unplayable. DO NOT BUY ANY EA GAME (that require EA launcher to work) or you will get Fucked in the Ass by EA

Most buggy game i have seen a while... Buggy mess

Not worth the price, buy it on sale

This game is actually goated, one of the best arcade racers on steam, The races are fun, the cops are actually hard and that makes the chases actually fun (especially on heat 5). This game and a good music playlist is a 10/10 combo (beer optional)

A Car game that does not have support for DD wheels.. This is just stupid.
EA needs to go Bankrupt so that we get better games.

Cons: Music, Physics, unrealistic car tier list, $6 for the 6th fastest car in the game doesn't unlock all cosmetics for said car, Lack of good nfs body-kits from blackbox era, bad drift physics, bad story, annoying characters, cheaters and rammers ruined online experience, quality of life is ass without mods, acceleration and nitro boost can't exist without each other.

just your average need for speed game, nothing too different. would be better without having to install the EA launcher.

The best "current" Need for Speed game, the closest you can get when it comes to the gold old ones like Most Wanted and Carbon.

This is a game.

I suppose I kind of like it, but nothing stands out to me. I'm not a racing game expert and connoisseur, so I don't know what to say. You can buy car and go VROOOOOOOMMMM SCREEEECH PUT-PUT-PUT-PUT BROOM BROOM SSSSKRRRRRRTT, etcetera.

Personally my favourite parts of the game are

- customising the appearance of my car and person
- Smashing Flamingos
- Finding uncanny Teddy Bears just existing menacingly
- Collecting and breaking stuff
- Ramming into the side of police cars at over 300kmph

Racing is okay I guess, but not really what attracts me to these games. Racing is like the job you get paid for and when you're done you have to spend most of it on whatever upgrades make the numbers next to the stats increase. Big number good. I'm guessing these games are called Need For Speed to remind intellectually impaired people that speed is one of the fundamental aspects of racing.

I play on easy mode but still manage to lose half the races I participate in. Some call me a bad driver, but I am just efficient. I find the fastest route to the finish line. I get there so fast, the game doesn't register that I won and keeps telling me I missed a checkpoint. I'm always being ridiculed for simplifying things. I'm the one in the wrong, not the people wasting petrol by driving on every bit of road within a 10 mile radius of the destination.

Edit: To clarify, the flamingos are just neon lights shaped like flamingos and by smashing I mean pounding them against the front of my car.

No Steam Cloud support, poor optimization, dull gameplay.

I spend 1-2 hours tuning/decorating my car (Honda civic Type R).
As I was adding the finishing touches the online server crashes. Long story short my Civic is back to default.
I alt+f4 and start FH4

thanks EA...

Best graphics and best racing game ever

Cops in this game probably snort a line before chasing you in a Crown Victoria that disobeys all laws of physics

One of the most boring parts — the cars handle like you're playing a mobile game on a phone, the opponents pose no challenge even on the hardest difficulty, and the teammates constantly spout silly lines. The music is terrible and makes you want to fall asleep. Racing games should be about the joy of driving and the thrill of winning — you won't find any of that here. This game is full of compromises aimed at appealing to the widest possible audience, and as a result, it's dry and dull.

Pros: graphics, car selection, customization.
Cons: car handling, story, opponents, music.

Nice game with cool cars and aftermarket parts

Good game and nice graphic

Fun game play the customization is great and it has an awesome sense of speed great racing game

A pretty good racing game when you actually get it to work, had to try like 3 different times. lacks qol life things like changing which safehouse you leave from and rebinding the buttons on a controller. Do like that you have to go out at night to make your money even usable. 7/10

As of April 2025, this game couldn't be more glitchy if it tried, absolutely unplayable

engine start no problem tdn tdn tdn tdn motor engine kaput
btw forza fans dont tend to get along with nfs fans.. so if you dislike cop chases this game is not for you.. :)

This is an amazing car game and fun to play and race against your friends and others

trash woke ea slop, not one white male character to pick, not worth even 99% off on sale.

Installed this on another pc and neither EA App or Steam had my save game synced. Everything started from the beginning again. Steam still shows my achievements yet the game starts anew. Then I tried to launch it from my other PC where i had the save file but when the game opened it remote the save file and started from scratch. Apparently EA never provided a solution to this issue to anyone.

Game looks and feels worse than some random free racing game on a phone, i didnt expect such a massive fail from a need for speed game but yeah, not worth the 3 bucks at all

Problem Performance, my pc rtx 2070 intel i7 still suttering in high or low setting grafic, this is game crash performance

What a terrible performance, not optimized at all

The cops in this game are invincible. You cant ditch them. This makes gaining rep a chore, instead of a game.
Would not recommend!!

This game is terrible. You can't configure the joypad, you can't configure the keyboard, it's basically the worst game I've ever spent money on.

Absolutely don't buy this game because you will lose your nerves over cops, they are overpowered so much that I think development team didn't even test them, they just wrote that they should be THIS much powerful and just decided it was good. There are no pursuit brakers or anything and plus you have health which you have to make sure that they dont damage, which they will in just ONE MINUTE if you are in a chase on 3+ heat level. Just don't buy this game and save yourselves some money. I want to say one more thing, you have NO CHANCE of escaping cops when you achieve heat level 3. Don't buy it!

don't touch this garbage ridiculed by the ea launcher and dx errors.
goodluck even launching this game, you're gonna need it.
f u k you ea

The only thing that this trash heats is your PC. Well only good thing is hardly cost anything to buy this on sale.

a classic need for speed game that continued the point of the series itself, but one thing made this game special. and those are the characters, the characters in this need for speed are somehow special to me, more unique than other need for speed games. And about the music at night while driving and racing, I think it would take me 10 hours to describe how good it is. 9/10

The rubber banding on the cops makes it damn near impossible to advance the game. It's super annoying. You can grind away for hours and lose it all in seconds when the game decides to spawn a bunch of cops directly in front of you. And it doesn't matter how fast your car is, or how good you are at driving, you cannot outrun them. Only way is to get lucky and have them wreck into a building or something. Otherwise, forget about it. Don't buy unless you like being bogged down with dump game mechanics.

Good story, Fun race, Bad Cops

Game is really bad or mid at best. The visuals are good and the tuning is really nice and thats about it for the good side.
The steering is very poorly made and you cant take the most normal turn without drifting. The drifting is also not the best and very unpredictable.

The sounds in the game are so incredibly bad i cant even describe it if you dont rev the cars fully up it just doesnt make a sound at all.
Literally everything aside from visuals and tuning is absolutely trash in this game do NOT buy it especially not for 70 dollars.
this game is an absolute joke.

A 100+ hour review, since i played the game with steam in offline mode just to clarify

If games such as NFS Most Wanted 2005 and Rivals are your benchmark for the NFS franchise, this game can often under deliver on those expectations.

The story campaign is short so take your time playing the game doing side activities as well. Played the game on hard difficulty.

The soundtrack the very first time you start playing is exciting but soon becomes stale whether free roaming or in events. At night there is a different playlist though that is also limited to a few songs that become repetitive soon. Compare this to games like most wanted and rivals where each soundtrack actually got the adrenaline flowing and are still in my Spotify playlists

Yes the graphics in the night time reminds you a lot of NFS Underground and Carbon but the roads are majority of the time wet and dry being very scarce, even during the day which sometimes looks ugly, but could be a more of a preference. Overall the game is a pretty looking game however a lot of graphic settings must be tweaked and even after that there are certain artifacts and shimmering present. Need For Optimisation.

Equipping engine, tyre, differential and suspension parts to make the car equipped for road, race, off road, drifting is a tedious process with a very rigid equipping and de-equipping system that takes away the fun of choosing a car and going full beans with it. Not that user friendly.
On that point even the Map does not have a filter to choose races that give you the most money or rep at the night but you have to manually keep hovering over the map to see which race or event is best, another not so user friendly approach, takes away the ebb and flow of a NFS game. Also if a certain event is giving you the most bank or rep, you keep doing those races which makes it even more repetitive. The map size is decent and there is a decent variety of roads highways etc.

Cops are both stressful sometimes in certain areas of the map and at the same time very much easy to shake off, particularly when you get a good 250+ rated car. So early gameplay its very exciting getting into cop chases however later on it looses that feeling unlike most wanted or rivals, best cop mechanics in those games.

So to sum it up if the game is available in sales its a good deal but keep your expectations in check with the fun you will have,