Need for Speed 20 - Nothing To See Here with Porsche 911 Carrera RSR

With Need for Speed Heat on the horizon I decided to do a quick revisit of the 21 previous NFS games leading up to the launch of Heat. Here you can see Need for Speed 20, which was released in 2015 and 2016 for various platforms. In this game I recorded the mountain sprint race event "Nothing To See Here" with the Porsche 911 Carrera RSR.

With this game Ghost Games wanted to show that not only Criterion can come up with stupid names, so they simply named the game "Need for Speed" without any specific title at all, so you can find people referring to the game as NFS 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 2015 and 2016 among other things. In my list of main entries to the franchise it is found at number 20.

NFS 20 tried to go back to the style and theme of Underground and Carbon, with the game taking place in a city at night. Unfortunately it's yet another game with very poor handling physics, this time so bad that even many casual players complain about them. Once again drifting is faster but your car won't always drift when you want it to. Sometimes it will just refuse to drift or turn at all and go straight into the wall.

The game also has a somewhat complex handling tuning with a lot of different sliders, which the devs tried to sell as something good but is actually not something that I like at all. In a good arcade racing game the cars drive properly by default and you shouldn't have to mess with any sliders. Another dumb thing is that a lot of cars have 7 or even 8 gears, with some of them not being very useful.

At launch the game didn't have real multiplayer races either and when they were added later on with an update it was the dreaded speedlist system again instead of a proper lobby system. As you can see in the video the game also has very long loading times and I didn't even bother to switch to single player here, which would force me to go through the screen with the controller a second time (and you have to do this every time you start the game).

Not even the race timer is working properly, as ISAD has shown in the past. It only stops a little while after you cross the finish line and the delay isn't always the same, making the game even less interesting for competitive players than it already was anyway.

Once again map, tracks and car lineup are fine but can't really be enjoyed because of the poor general gameplay. The police is in the game as well but it's kind of a joke. In some previous NFS games the police was kind of strong but in this one it is laughably weak, except in a couple of story missions which you can't even replay in the same way after you have beaten them.

One area where I think the game gets criticized too much in the community though is the post-launch support. This game got more updates than almost every other NFS, so I don't get why some people say that the support for this game was stopped very fast. That's not really true at all. Even major things like manual transmission and multiplayer races were added post-launch. They just weren't really able to make the game good because nothing can make a racing game good when it has such flawed base physics.

Another thing that got too much criticism was the difficulty of the prestige mode. I think there is nothing wrong at all with making the gold medal targets so hard that only very few people can beat them and only with specific cars, since you aren't missing out on any content if you can only get bronze or silver. If the gold medal targets are too hard for you, then you just aren't the type of player that they are meant for. They were meant for the best players in the game and I think it's awesome that the devs added something optional specifically for those players for once. If there was any major content locked behind the gold medals, then it would be another story but it's literally just one tiny voice line and a trophy/achievement. I would be happy if more racing games had some optional very hard Time Attack events without any major rewards, just for the very best players to challenge and prove themselves.

Like all 21 main NFS games Need for Speed 20 can be played on a modern PC with Windows 10.

I will attempt to show you all 21 existing NFS games before the release of Heat, so expect to see a video almost every day from now until the release of Heat and on some days even two. :)

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