Need For Speed: Carbon - hands on

Editor's Note: Okay, you got us. This hands-on was originally written and posted on our 360 channel.However, after spending a good hour or so with the PS3 NFS, we can safely say that the onlynoticable difference, for better or worse, is that the PS3 version enables you to tilt the controller for a little extra steering on tight turns. Everything else is identical, unless you're a programmer who wants toread about pixel shaders versus vertex shaders... which we're guessing you're not. Now, back to our previously scheduled preview...

When we popped Need For Speed: Carbon into our Xbox 360, we were looking forward to some white knuckle excitement in the underworld of illegal street racing. Sadly, we found a somewhat stripped down version of the previous Need For Speed: Most Wanted with a couple of gimmicky additions slapped on.

Maybe our expectations were irrationally raised by the intense high-speed cop chases of Most Wanted, but we found the new Autosculpt feature, canyon races and open crew tactics unable to prevent it from feeling like a throw-back to the days of Need For Speed: Underground. Granted, Carbon has cop chases, but they are fairly few and far between early in the game and don't have quite the same bite that they did in Most Wanted. While we rejoiced in Autosculpting our rides, we also couldn't help but notice that, even though the feature uses sliders to alter certain features of your body kit, the gradual changes were pretty unnecessary and we found that we'd rack the slider to one side or the other - basically leaving us with two choices for body design.