Besides, that's why God gave us powersliding: tap the brake, hit the turn and slide around with as little loss in speed as possible.Ĭarbon introduces the ability to bring a 'wingman' into the action. It's nice to have the option and certainly gives the player a bit more control to their vehicle, but it's not something that comes all that naturally, especially in a D-pad controlled game where the turns fly towards the player at a gazillion miles an hour. Likewise, down on the D-pad with the turn with offer tighter control. Since the Nintendo DS lacks an analog stick, the designers add a little more touch control to the D-pad steering: if you need a softer turn, mashing up while steering left or right eases a looser arc than if you simply pressed left or right. Though Carbon uses a whole line-up of licensed cars that behave differently, they're not based in reality - Carbon is, like the rest of the Need for Speed series, an arcade racer that's way more exaggerated than your sim-style games like Gran Turismo.

That's why it's a good thing this racer pulls off fun driving with an incredibly high energy level. But as good as Carbon looks on the Nintendo DS, a racing game's nothing if the cars don't handle properly.

The look of the environments falls in line with what Pocketeers did in Need for Speed Underground 2, but Exient's visual tech and style bumps up the quality from EA's racer released on the DS two years prior. The game is fast-paced with a solid graphics engine running at 60 frames per second and pulling off some visual trickery, like motion blurring and fish-eye stretching to increase that sensation of speed. But beyond the boring story is a really solid and decently- developed racer. There's a story here about surviving a carwreck and getting back into the game, but honestly it's not all that interesting - it's nice that the development team wanted to give some life to the handheld game, but this comic book-like plot just didn't really seem to gel as it's told through its bland text-based speech bubbles. It also lays out what the game's all about: with each victory in the underground racing circuit, you take back portions of the city from the skilled rivals. The subtitle 'Own the City' for the Nintendo DS game notes that this game, though lifting its style and ideals from the game released on the GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, and soon the PlayStation3, it's its own design. But the team managed to leapfrog over last year's game and even outdo the original Need for Speed Underground 2 with a fun and frantic design. Honestly, after the mess that was Need for Speed: Most Wanted DS, Exient didn't have a whole lot to live up to. This is definitely true for the case of Need for Speed Carbon on the system. Exient is best known for its work on the Nintendo DS renditions of FIFA and Madden - with the exception of FIFA Street on the system this handheld development team manages to pull off a solid job of producing the dual-screen versions of the bigger console games.

Need for speed carbon ds