NASCAR Heat 4

NASCAR. The biggest racing company. NASCAR Heat. A 20 year franchise that’s been big since the early 2000s. NASCAR Heat 4. A great game that I recently got and have enjoyed since the very start. It’s interesting how other drivers can like you or not based on your driving . I do really like NASCAR Heat 4. I think you should try it to kill an hour or something. It’s enjoyable.

When it comes to racing games, I don’t mind a simple oval track to offer something different, but the majority of this game is on oval tracks - just slightly different surfaces or angles to the curves. Therefore it’s mainly boring.

You can form relationships with other drivers by responding nicely to their social media messages (portrayed like Twitter). Or you can be rivals by insulting them. You can provoke them by ramming them during the race. Drivers easily forgive you if you use the apologise option. You are basically in control of who you want to like you or hate you. Sometimes they send you video clips instead of text messages. These can often be very cringey. Infact, the text can be cringey when they claim you are doing some activity with them like camping/karaoke/picnic/bowling etc.

In each race, you practice, then qualify, then the race proper. The first lap of practice and qualifying doesn’t count because it’s often 90% of a lap since you usually start coming out of the pit area. You can skip the practice, but the qualifier is pretty essential to start higher up the grid; this is a major advantage to start high.

There’s a team system where you can get offers to join higher paying teams based on your performance. You can form your own team although you can’t seem to hire other drivers. You earn more money in each race but you can’t really win without upgrading your car and staff which can cost a lot of money.

There’s three categories shown on each car you have: Engine, Aerodynamics, and Suspension and you can assign one staff member in each area to improve the car’s attributes. You have a maximum limit which can be extended too. After each race, the stats will decrease again, which depends on how clean you raced. To start with a perfect car, you really need multiple cars, and enough good staff. So they can work on 2 cars, you race with car A, then the next race, they work on 2 cars but you now race with car B. Each car you have is geared towards a category of race like Speedway, Super Speedway, Short Race and a few others. Choosing the wrong car takes a performance hit going into the race.

When you assign your staff, there is an auto assign option, but it seems there’s no logic to the algorithm, so it just assigns a staff member to the next open slot and doesn’t take into account if the staff member suits that role, or can actually increase the performance (stat may already be maxed out)

If you do well then you can be invited to one-off races in the next category. If you do well, then you will be invited to race in that category for the next season.

The first season was cars mainly on dirt circuits, then the next season is trucks. The trucks seem to have a large focus on drafting, but it seemed inconsistent whether you would draft or not. You really do notice the additional speed and it displays on your speedometer.

The graphics are good, and the load times are great too. For me, there was a several second load for the event. But you can seamlessly jump in and out of practice, and quickly launch the qualifying and race.

To say the game is mainly simple ovals, I did have a surprising amount of fun. If you are into this style of racing, then I’m sure you will be impressed. For more casual race fans, I think I’d cautiously recommend it.