The demo of NFS: Carbon, is much like most demo's on XBL, not nearly enough to make you see all the features in the game. This demo points out a few of the franchise's new features: Sculpting your vehicle and crew communications.
Game Engine
If you liked the game play from NFS: Most Wanted on the Xbox 360 you will enjoy this new release. The game engine is pretty much, from what I can tell, the same exact one. They may have given it a few tweaks, but from the demo it looks like the prior game. The colors are a bit more vibrant and it seems that the camera shakes and blurs a bit more to give you the idea of "speed."Your Team ("Gang")
This release has something new that hasn't occured in an NFS game: a team. Not multi-player, but AI "squads" similar to that of Blazing Angels. When your meter is charged you can call upon one of the racers, your buddy, to try to block people behind you or take out cars in front of you. This helps give you that edge in the race. Apparently, if your team car hits the finish line in a circuit race before you, you will win as well.
Sculpting
This seems to be the focus feature on the new release. Sculpting is now how you "mod" your car! You don't simply buy a specific part that looks cool and color it - you completely mold it the way you want it to look. This concept is familiar to those fans of Fight Night: Round 3 where you are able to completely customize your boxers features down to the eyes.As you select a "zone" to customize, a blue bar lights up around the pieces in question. You then can move your zone bar from 0% to 100% or anywhere in between. This changes how long the piece grows, how far it drops towards the ground, etc. So, when working on a grill piece, you can move the bar towards 100% and it will make the grill wider and consume more of the front end.
When working on the tail pipe, the tip will get larger and drop a bit closer to the ground. All the pieces around it will fit to accommodate its new size. So, you can go from a stock look to a tricked out massive pipe with just a few slides of the zone bar(s).
Each part has one or more zones that you can tweak. One might tweak a zone for the length, the depth and yet another for the width. The part that seems to have the most customizable zones, from this demo, would be the wheels. You can adjust the spoke depth, number of spokes, width of spokes, bezels, width of the overal tires and radius of the wheel. With enough tweaking you may look to be driving on black fat rubber bands. Highly tricked.
When you select your vehicle (the demo has three), the first feature presented is sculpting. You can "autosculpt" if you don't want to take the time to mod the vehicle but it is apparent that this is the first feature EA wants you to demo in this download.
World Maps
The demo takes place on three different "levels" (parts of the city). The first is a circuit race, the second is a drift competition and the third is... locked until you beat the other two. I haven't beaten those yet (consistently come in 4th place). So, not too much is known about the locked zone yet.
Racing Circuit
This is typical NFS style racing. You race the course, dodging incoming vehicles, slow drivers and opponents. You have your speed breaker to slow down the game and make dodgy corners, your nitrous to edge upon your opponents or leave them in the dust and your new crew communications to tell them to pwn your adversaries.The world is just as interactive as the last release of NFS. Just as with Most Wanted, you can find hidden avenues to take, parking lots to cross through and other methods to gain advantage or fall behind. Of course, you always have the option to blow through street signs, take out lamp posts like it's your job and drive phone boths down teh block.
Besides the new levels this part of the game looks like a new level of NFS: Most Wanted with crew communications added into the mix.
Drifting
Not since NFS: Underground have we had drifting! I suck at it just as much as I did back then. However, drifting does seem to have been re-designed. This might be due to the NFS game engine that was obviously part of NFS: Most Wanted. The cars are responsive but not too responsive - so you find yourself drifting with some control and not twitching into walls left and right. You can use nitrous while on the drift course and you have your handbreak...do the math. Lot's of cool drifts.As a gimpy drift racer I can tell you that this one seems easier to adapt to. With only a few races it is easy to see this becoming something learnable with less ramp-up time than that of Underground.
Cockpit Communications
New to this series is the communications with your team. Although you can only give rudementary commands (i.e. hit a button and your team will do what it thinks it should) this might be a demo only limitation - I am not sure. However, your team member will keep you up-to-date on the race and the competition. You may hear things like "ok, he's coming up on your right, watch out" or "I'm out of nitrous, give me a second" and the not so good "ok, he's just too fast for me, I cannot seem to catch him."The in-car voice doesn't seem to be nearly as repetitive as Madden in NFL nor as annoying. But with only a few minutes of play on a demo release it is unclear how annoying the car communications will be.
Overall
If you are a die hard fanboy, this demo will not change your mind: You will buy this game. If you are a racing enthusiast and have been entertained with the NFS franchise it is not going to disappoint (from the demo at least). The demo seems to lack any scenario races like NFS: Most Wanted such as cop chases, and racking up fines.If you are new to the NFS franchise, this demo may leave you wondering what features the game will hold. For those that have collections of NFS games you will fill in the gaps from the lacking in the demo and already know what to expect. Like any sequel - the game will have much of the same features as the prior with a few additional changes.
Biggest disappointment: A 1.0GIG download!? The demo is fairly short considering the size of the download and if you plan on downloading it during peak hours you might be waiting an additional day to play.
