Need for Speed: No Limits

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Need for Speed: No Limits
The title is nothing but a lie.
Genre(s): Racing Platform(s): iOS Android Release Date: September 30, 2015 Developer(s): Firemonkeys Studios Publisher(s): EA Series: Need for Speed Predecessor: Need for Speed Rivals Successor: Need for Speed (2015)

Need for Speed: No Limits is an arcade racing video game developed by FireMonkeys Studios and published by Electronic Arts for iOS and Android as part of Need for Speed series. The game was released on September 30, 2015.

Why It Has Too Many Limits

1. While the controls are easy to pick up, it becomes too simple and not challenging once you've done so.
   • Despite the simplicity of the controls, Firemonkeys somehow manage to leave a bug in it that will occasionally cause your car to veer uncontrollably to the right. This can easily cost you your race.
2. You can't even use your brakes, despite them being a core staple of every racing game!
3. You must be online every time you need to play this game.
4. Ironically, despite being named No Limits (most likely due of the theme of street racing and breaking the rules), the game features a fuel system, which is just one of the many limits in this title.
5. Another limit is that the races are usually extremely short and can be finished in under 30 seconds. Even the mobile port of Need For Speed: Most Wanted had longer single lap races.
6. The AI in this game is also rather... limited. All they are capable of is following a pre-programmed route and fire up nitrous whenever they feel like it. They can't even drift! At times, the AI racers may slam into you repeatedly as if they're after your blood, but it's actually not programmed aggression. Instead, it's just their extremely limited environmental awareness.
   • While police are present in the game, they unfortunately share the racer's AI and therefore barely do anything to interfere your race and hardly pose a threat unless they spawn in groups of 3 or more.
7. The hitbox detection of this game is quite wonky; occasionally, simply scraping the wall will completely force stop your car.
   • At times, hitting a traffic car can reduce your speed by nearly 100 mph (161 km/h) instead of the usual 10 mph (16 km/h).
   • Also, sometimes just scraping a road block will fill up your damage bar by 33.33% but at times slamming into one at full speed only fill it up by 25%.
8. Following the trend of recent F2P mobile racing games like Asphalt 8: Airborne and Asphalt 9: Legends, cars require "blueprints" to upgrade, making collecting cars an enormous grind fest.
   • The upgrading system in this game is also rather unconventional, instead of just spending a big wad of cash to upgrade a certain aspect of the car, you'll have to collect specific parts in order to slot them into your car parts and slowly raise their Performance Rating (PR), meaning that upgrading high-end cars such as Super or Hypercars could take weeks or even months!
9. Tuner Trials are exceptionally frustrating due to their repetitiveness. They reward you with necessary parts and cash to upgrade your cars, but they all take place on the exact same tracks in the exact same cars.
   • However, Tuner Trials' tracks were changed in a 2019 update.
10. Tons and tons of microtransactions, as usual for freemium games and EA games.
11. The VIP Levels 1, 2, and 3 can expire after a short period of time if you don't continue buying more IAP items.
12. The removal of Visual Points means that all car customizations are now free, which is decent, although they can only be unlocked by leveling up your car, which is more egregious.
13. Prior to the Lion's Den Update, none of the Ferrari cars can be customized at the Modshop, as EA decided to keep the Rosso Corsa red color on all Ferrari cars with normal coloring of wheels, windows, and brakes only.
    • In addition, these cars cannot receive decals. All of this is due to Ferrari's strict policy on customization of their cars, though.
    • However, the aforementioned update added the option to re-paint Ferrari cars to any of the brand's factory colors. However, the Giallo Modena and Blu Pozzi colors are locked to a 225 Gold paywall, with Nero Daytona costing an extremely high amount of 350 Gold, slightly more expensive than a 150 gold premium wrap and only unlocks for the car it was bought for. This is either due to Ferrari's licensing policy or EA's greed.
14. Tournament has been removed and replaced with Blackridge Rivals, which is rewarding but extremely repetitive and somewhat pay-to-win (you'll always have to use your best car to yield the best results). Then, the devs replaced Blackridge Rivals with Underground Rivals, which is purely pay-to-win (now you can only use certain cars and the best cars are usually special events or IAP cars).
15. The matchmaking of the multiplayer is simply atrocious, back in the tournament days, you can choose between opponents that either has a higher, equal or lower amount of Performance Rating (PR) which yields different amount of points, making for a decent Risk/Reward system. In Blackridge Rivals and Underground Rivals the system randomly selects an opponent for you and it's common to get matched with a player with much higher PR than you do.
    • Also, to encourage using their driving skills, in Rival tier, the player gets often matched with a tuned car against a skilled opponent with lower division rating, which is done to just extract division rating from the player.
16. Cheaters were once very common in multiplayer, and it wasn't until Underground Rivals is introduced when the report cheater function was added.
17. Most special events consist of fake difficulty.
    • Thanks to the AI's general incompetence, races are seldom difficult, and back in the old days, the only way for the devs to make races hard was to give your opponent a much higher PR, which at times felt rather cheap, especially in Hunter races where your rival already had a head start.
    • Now that these high PR gap races are history, the devs simply lock the races behind (at times) annoyingly high PR requirements. So now the challenge is not about driving well, but instead about trying and upgrading your car to the required level in the limited period of time. All you need now is a stingy drop system that seldom gives you the parts you need. Also, it has a higher chance to be sold with gold instead of event credits.
    • While the Proving Grounds events did provide challenge to your driving skills, some of its challenges are luck based ones or depend on trial-and-error gameplay, especially the Nitro Zone challenges which generates a random layout every time you try it. Thankfully, the devs have accepted the feedback and made them fixed.
18. As is the case with current mobile racers (e.g. CSR Racing 2), NFS NL is sometimes the first game to feature a new car model (thus marking that car's video game debut), although this is not a good thing and is becoming more frowned upon as more often than not, the new cars that are added to the game are blocked off by massive paywalls and are purposely given better performance than previous cars to lure out our wallets. A notable example of a car it stole when a console game could have debuted that car instead is the Jaguar XE SV Project 8, which later went on to appear in The Grand Tour Game, albeit poorly modelled.
19. The recent revamp of the campaign is also not very well received amongst the playerbase, although the introduction of new tracks that are usually seen only in special events is welcomed, the fact that many of the races are changed to have more requirements to win annoyed plenty of players, as it means that players can no longer simply put their game on autopilot to farm for materials but instead have to play these races manually. The only other option is using race skips which are only available in very limited quantities.
    • However, an update removed the challenge requirements from these aforementioned events when replaying them, allowing one to autopilot when replaying these races.
20. Many 2020-released cars do not have any car series with them, making them mostly dust collectors unless they are required for Underground Rivals.
    • However, certain updates are slowly adding car series for the newly released cars.
21. Some bugs from older updates still persist in later ones, such as being unable to change the license plate of the Honda NSX (NC1), which Firemonkeys refuses to fix due to having to prioritize EA's money-making tactics.

No Limit Qualities

1. The car customization system is rather decent and is one of the largest custom systems of any mobile racing game; for many cars, the livery, body kit, rims and colors can all be customized.
2. The graphics of the game are rather good.
3. It's actually possible to win most, if not all of the special events without spending any money. Maxing out the cars they provide is a different story, though.
4. An update has added a "Special Event Vault" that allows all players to play past special events (called "Vault Events") that they either missed or failed to complete the first time around. This is good for players who like to experience special events on their own time and not have to worry about missing out on their favorite cars. VIP players can also run up to three Vault Events at a time depending on their level. The only caveats are that players have to complete Event Nodes and Unlock Nodes to unlock more Story Events, and a number of earlier Bounty Events to unlock higher end ones, although any events that you already completed before they were added to the vault will automatically count towards such requirements and do not have to be replayed.
5. Despite not many, there're some amazing soundtrack. One of them is Raise The Dead by Le Castle Vania.

Reception

Need for Speed: No Limits received mixed to positive reception from critics, but was hit with mixed to negative reviews from user scores at Metacritic.

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