Car handling
The handling characteristics of each car are easiest to feel by driving it live during gameplay: here, as with real cars, as in life, there are no clear-cut answers. And, of course, when sharing my impressions with you, I can't do without analogies to the previous game in the series: NFSU2.
The first thing you feel almost immediately is drifting. It has become noticeably stronger, and even slow all-wheel-drive cars start to break into a drift on sharp turns. It is especially dangerous when, during a turn, you get hit in the body, even a weak one—at first you have to make considerable effort not to fly off the track and not spin around with your rear bumper facing the direction of travel. However, it is easy enough to get used to and adjust, and after half an hour of driving it is not noticeable.
New feature: the time slowdown mode works roughly like nitrous—it builds up over time and activates while the button is held. At the same time, time around you starts to flow much slower, allowing you to carefully negotiate a particularly difficult turn.
The second important detail is the sense of speed. It seems very much that in MW the kilometers on the speedometer have come into line with reality. Here you will no longer see a flower bed “slowly floating by” on your right while the gauges show our speed at around 100 km/h. No, everything is honest.
Car collisions also happen completely differently. The simple trick of hooking the bumper of the car ahead to spin it into the nearest fence no longer works. Contact with an opponent's rear bumper will achieve nothing but losing your own speed. If simply competing with an opponent in speed is uninteresting, you can try another maneuver: gently nudge it with your side into the oncoming lane, head-on into some city vehicle, like a cement mixer. Or, alternatively, into a tree, a concrete barrier or some other solid object that it planned to drive around in close proximity to our car. But keep in mind that the physics in the game have become noticeably more honest, and you can no longer “play” with other cars without the risk of losing speed.
Finally, obstacles. These, on the contrary, have become far more friendly. Cardboard boxes, poles and road signs, benches and fences are knocked down easily and effortlessly, with almost no threat to speed. This is especially noticeable with the posts separating adjacent lanes where lane changes are prohibited: you can knock them all down without ending up last in the list of racers. However, much depends on the opponent. If you play through the game competing against computer opponents, it is quite possible without paying much attention to such trifles, but a real player who drives around even minor obstacles may urge you to be careful.