If you’ve recently read my review of this year’s new Need For Speed game, then you would’ve read that this edition more heavily delves into car customization fairly similar to the former Underground series. NFS car customization deals a lot with performance, tuning the handling of the car, and heavily into the looks of your vehicle as well.

Now the car I first chose in the game is a Subaru which I like because they are pretty good on speed and good for drifting as well which is something you want since the game has a lot of drifting challenges. My car was pretty decent on most of the main challenges in the game, but there were some I should’ve won, but just couldn’t quite make it as while I did pull ahead for a time in some of the point to point challenges, one of the main competitors (usually one of the main characters in the game) would suddenly pull ahead close to the end and just barely beat me (thanks rubber band AI!).

It was then that I decided that once I built up enough money and rep points to unlock new parts which mainly was for the performance aspect of customization, I would do some major upgrades so I could better compete in these challenges and quickly stay with or get ahead of the pack. Trust me, after upgrading my car I could definitely see much better response to the challenges especially now that they are getting into a greater difficulty setting when my rank has increased.

I must say though that the fact that I can upgrade my car when new parts become available instead of having to buy a new car for the heftier challenges is quite refreshing to me especially since I like the car I bought. Now some of the things I was able to upgrade were mainly engine parts such as intake manifold, exhaust, fuel system, forced induction, electric system, ECM, and more. Doing all of this greatly increased my horse power, top speed, and acceleration. My car was now able to go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, has a top speed of 179mph and 477 horsepower.

After doing my performance upgrades, I wanted to test it out and so I did one of the newer and harder challenges that was close to my location and also was against one of the main characters known as Spike. It was a circuit race, but it was in a part of the map I hadn’t really explored yet and involved very curvy and twisty roads up in the suburban hills of the city which is very similar to Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. Even though the roads twisted and turned, I was able to stay ahead of the pack, drift around the curves and come in easily with a win.

Now like most car games, when you upgrade they do cost money. I had $45,000 plus (in-game) to spend on upgrades to my car and I definitely used a big chunk of that, but it was well worth it as now I can better compete with the competition and some other online players that may want to race me. I’m starting to build back the money fast that I spent on the upgrades. I’m definitely curious to see how it will hold up in the drifting challenges, but I think it’ll do just fine as it seems the drifting aspect of the vehicle is a little bit better.

Don’t worry though, this will be just the first of many upgrades and customizations to come. There are still a lot of parts and stuff I need to unlock and upgrade especially performance wise to my car. I can’t wait to see just how high I can get its performance to see how well it stacks up against the higher end cars such as Ferraris and Lamborghinis. I will definitely post more to come from Need For Speed. In the meantime, check out the short video below of my performance options for my car upgrades.