Some impressions, played for a few hours today so far (used a Korean VPN to unlock it).
If you want a Need for Speed game, don't bother with it. If you want a Burnout game, pick it up.
This feels like Burnout Paradise with cops and licensed cars.
So besides that here is my thoughts on things in the game so far.
It is a solid racing game, it looks nice and plays nice. The music is downright horrible even for a bunch of licensed stuff that EA usually does.
My biggest problems I've had with gameplay are and mainly, there is no penalty for the cops busting you, they bust you and it simply says busted and the screen goes back to where you were and you continue playing. It is easier and quicker to just get busted if there was something you were wanting to do right away then trying to ditch them. You no longer earn money or any type of currency you can do anything with, you simply have to do races for each car to unlock upgrades for that car and you can customize your car anywhere even in the middle of a race if you want and can do imo retarded crap because of that, you can earn self inflating tires, so if you hit a spike strip from the cops you can slap on those self inflating tires and boom tires are back. Basic layout for upgrades seems to be pick a car, there are 6 races total for that car. Each race has 2 upgrades, 1 for first and 1 for second, so if you come in first place you get both upgrades. Repeat that formula for each card as you only use upgrades on the card you won them for. Note, all the races aren't actually just races, for example there is one where you are solo and you have to keep an average speed of xxx the entire race to qualify for whatever place.
My only other issue with races is that you can only restart the race while in it and there is no redo last race when you just finish it and have to drive all the way back to start it again, there was a few times it was really close and I wasn't sure if I was going to get 1st or 2nd till we finished the line and then have to drive all the way back to redo it. At least when I know I'm not in 1st I can simply pause and restart the race.
You find cars now by driving around and seeing them parked (they will have a the their automakers logo above them so they are not hard to see and some are even premarked on the map). You can earn a few cars in that when you race and beat a person on the most wanted list, at the end of the race you can take down their car and earn it, but that is it. The map, I dunno, it feels a bit small, but there are lots of alleyways and you can enter a lot of structures to go up a few levels. There is lots of gates and billboards to find and smash, my only issue with the billboards is they respawn but don't count towards the grand total as each billboard destroyed so it is a bit annoying seeing one and you are not sure if you destroyed it or not.
Honestly, it seems Criterion just made a Burnout game here and slapped a NFS logo on it. Don't get me wrong, I love Burnout (Burnout 3 was one of the best racing games ever imo love it). But I wanted a NFS game here (and Most Wanted (from 2005) was one of my fav NFS), not BO with cops.
It probably wouldn't irritate so bad if getting caught my the cops had no penalty and that you can cheese your way with customizing anywhere anytime.