Played a few hours last night.
Man, you guys weren't kidding about the rubberbanding. I don't get a lot of racing games, the last NFS game I bought was SHIFT, though I loved the Underground series. But right off the bat the rubberbanding is there in full force. I thought it might be something that gets introduced later in the game, for the harder races to keep the challenge up, but I lost the first 3 races because of that shit. Now I remember Underground 1 had really bad rubberbanding as well, maybe I just had more of a tolerance to play it because I was younger. Either way, the rubberbanding is a disappointment in a game based on tuning and specing your ride to be better than the others.
The handling so far is really stiff and wonky. I didn't fool around too much with the sliders so hopefully I can figure out my sweet spot, but coming off of tons of hours of Driveclub, this feels so heavy.
The look of the game is great so far. Love the vibe, feel and visuals of the game. Environments look great, except for some weird quirks like the lighting changing on a dime. I'll literally be driving and in a second the skybox will literally go from pitch black midnight to dawn. What's going on there? I read somewhere that the lighting and day/night cycle might be location based instead of time based, and, at least to me, that's what it looks like.
The always online thing is dumb. As expected. I got kicked out of EA's servers for no apparent reason while tuning my car and had to jump back in the game.
Another dumb thing (that apparently is the reason for the always online) are the snapshots. It takes a snapshot of your car from a front angle after every race. For what purpose? Most of the time it's just a banged up version of your car, so you don't even get to fully appreciate your car because it's just been through the ringer. If you go to the snapshots page in the menu and see everyones uploaded shots, 90% of them are the cars from this angle after a race. Pretty dumb. No photo mode is pretty dumb too, as all you can do is spin the camera around the car and take your own shots.
That being said, the game is fun so far. I love the visual customization and the performance upgrades. I'm not super heavy into cars, so the explanations of what each part does is appreciated. It has just enough customization to make me want to get my hands dirty. If this was something like Gran Turismo level-depth I wouldn't even bother. So they do a good job of making all of it accessible even if you're not a gearhead.