YMMV / Need for Speed Rivals

• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • The game is saddled by an unskippable intro cutscene, unskippable tutorial videos that interrupt you in the middle of a race, and it does not allow you to navigate main menus when a (mostly for tutorials) voice over is happening.
  • When playing in an AllDrive session as the Police, be prepared to hear dispatch constantly notifying you about a pursuit in progress and urging you to intercept.
• First Installment Wins: Out of all four Ghost Games-developed Need for Speed games, this one got the best Metacritic scores, ranging from 75 to 80 depending on the platform. Keep in mind though that Criterion collaborated with them here; the closest Ghost Games got to reaching the same scores as this game on their own was their final game Need for Speed Heat, which only managed to get the lower 70s on Metacritic.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Koenigsegg One:1 systematically slaughters all of the other vehicles. It has the highest top-end speed in the game, it has very strong acceleration and great handling, and it is rather bulky for being a hypercar. The best thing? It's a FREE DLC car. Yes, it might be unlocked at the end of the game, but at that time it's more than certain you can use this vehicle without screwing up.
  • If you have EA Play on PC or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, then you get access to the Complete Edition on PC at no extra charge, which includes all the paid DLC cars. This means that you can easily gain access to some tier four cars much earlier in the game and upgrade them to your heart's content once you get the SpeedPoints.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you trigger Turbo and immediately start an event after that, the boost provided by Turbo will overcome the car's brakes, and you'll begin the event some distance beyond the start line and traveling at a small, but not insignificant, speed. It can help a lot for getting a few extra seconds on your opponents.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the songs in the game's soundtrack is "Pompeii" by Bastille, which would become better known in 2020 as part of the But If You Close Your Eyes meme, in which it was used in videos of countries and regions disappearing from maps. The meme's concept is not that far off from a infamous glitch from this game in which the entire highway you're racing in would disappear, leaving your car anchored still on a patch of dirt, making the song's appearance in this game extra fitting in hindsight.
  • The protagonist of the Cop career naming themselves F-8 (pronounced "Fate") seeminly predicted how the eight entry of The Fast and the Furious (a film series that famously was a big influence for the Black Box era of NFS games) ended up being titled The Fate of the Furious. (And yes, it tended to be abbreviated as just "F8".)
• So Okay, It's Average: The game got lower review scores than even the base-splitting Most Wanted (2012), but it is still considered a good arcade racer. The writer of this article shares this sentiment. It wasn't that Rivals as bad (it and Most Wanted 2012 were perfectly competent games themselves), it's just that—despite its philosophical narrations—it lacked personality, which the Fast & Furious-inspired Underground games had in spades.