Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City

"A pretty good "realistic" racer for the DS"

I have not played any other racing games for the DS apart from Mario Kart because they really wouldn't seem very good. I decided to see if I was right and was actually surprised about it. Being a fan of Need for Speed on consoles that seemed the right choice for the hand held to. Comparing Need for speed carbon on wii to the ds version would seem stupid, but im going to do it any way. EA have tried to make the games similar to each other by using the same cars, music and game play but thats all the similarities.

Graphics: 7/10
Graphically for the DS this is looking alright. The tracks and environments are nice. The cars look pretty good but are a bit jagged around the edges.

Sound:9/10
The sound tracks used in this game are actual songs like Joker and the Thief by Wolf Mother. This was surprisingly good because it adds a more realistic feel to speeding around a city.

Game play: 6/10
The Main idea of the game is to Own the city by taking over the neighbour hoods. There are 6 neighbour hoods with about 12 races in each neighbour hood. I thought it was great that there were going to be so many races, but the downside is that there are only 2 different tracks per neighbour hood. The race types consist of circuit, elimination, Sprint and Hunter. When defeating a race you will be rewarded by unlocks, visual points of points. Instead of buying parts to upgrade your cars, you use points. When it comes to upgrading and customizing it fairs quite well. There are a lot of parts for making your ride look like the speed machine, and lots to make it the performance master. When you crash your car during a race it goes spinning around on the roof. It's probably the worst thing in the whole game but it's nothing to major if you can drive.

Multi-player: 4/10
I am basing the multi-player score on single card play, not multi card play as I have not played multi card. Single card play is bare bones with only a few tracks and a few cars. It plays the same but could lag every now and again. Nintendo Wi-Fi connection would have been a good multi-player mode to have with this game and would have been a blast to play.

Overall: 7/10
Need for speed carbon: own the city is a good game, better then some other realistic type racers for the ds. It has nice graphics, excellent sound, decent gam play but poor single card multi-player.

Rent, buy or borrow?
If you like racing games but don't think they are fun on a hand held system, then rent it or borrow it. If you know that you like hand held racing games and are a NFS fan then buy it. If you cant find a place to rent it then see if any of your friends have it and ask to borrow it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/18/07