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I previously talked a lot about how I only "review" completed games, and how I should also mention other games which I never finished and thus don't have a fully formed opinion on. So yeah, here we go, let's begin with 2021, when the blog first started. There are probably other games that I have retired and simply forgot about, these are just the ones I see on my HLTB "retired" list. Also the dates may be a bit off because I may have edited some entries later, or added them to the library much earlier, so the sorting may have been wrong as a result.
I briefly played this in 2021, so before the war in Ukraine, and my experience with the game has nothing to do with it. Basically I'd died (twice, I remember correctly), but the game was a bit too depressing for me to try again. There seemed to be a fair bit of depth and amount of content, so maybe it was worth sticking with it, but I did not have the patience at the time. And I don't really feel like coming back to it now.
Used to play this as a kid, but never got too far, in part due to the brutal free-to-play economy. Revisited it in 2021 after learning that the servers have been revived by the community, in the form of Soapbox Race World. Specifically I played on the Russian-speaking World Evolved server. It was great fun, economic rewards were greatly boosted, so in a reasonable amount of time I progressed through the game and got myself some fast cars. The community has added new race tracks, new cars, new achievements, and even new experimental game modes like daily challenges - note that different community servers will have different content. Online races were fully functional, though can be challenging when playing against experienced die-hard players. Graphically the game may be dated in comparison to the latest Forza Horizons and the like, but this is low-spec gaming we're talking about, so this was a benefit to me.
I guess I just never marked this as "completed" due to it being, well, an MMO, but realistically with the new non-profit-driven economy you can reasonably experience a good amount of the content. Highly recommend trying this out if you like the older era of NFS.
gardenapple - 2024-02-06