Need for Speed Most Wanted Review

The title of Need for Speed: Most Wanted should probably be ignored. This latest entry into the long-running and highly divergent racing franchise bears little relation to the original game, as it is developed by Criterion, the masterminds behind the excellent Burnout: Paradise and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Their latest creation, while bearing the Need for Speed name, might be more appropriately called Burnout: Hot Pursuit since it feels like a mash-up of Criterion’s last two titles. While this promising combination of open-world racing and police chases sounds tantalizing and has great potential, some of the elements that made their last two games so addicting and enjoyable are missing, making Most Wanted feel indistinct and watered down. Add to this the weirdness of the game’s car unlock system alongside the crippling performance issues and Most Wanted starts to look like a lackluster effort from one of the best arcade racer devs around.

Like Burnout Paradise, Most Wanted takes place in a big open city that you are free to drive around in until you start a race. The city, Fairhaven, is dotted with billboards to smash and fences to bust, but now there are also cops roaming the streets. Cops are fairly tolerant of your shenanigans, but if you blast past them or run into one they will give chase. These chases will also occur in some races, and in these instances cannot be avoided. Cops will communicate with each other, and you get to listen in on their radio chatter, being informed of road blocks and spike strips. To escape the lawful pursuers you must get a certain distance from them and lose line of sight, at which point you enter a cool down period during which you must avoid all cops. Police chases can be very exciting, especially when you get into cool down and are using your mini-map to figure out which route to take in order to avoid bumping into police cars. However police chases can be extremely frustrating as well, especially when driving in a slower car. It can be difficult to lose the pursuers who sometimes lock on to you with ridiculous efficiency, and once you enter cool down mode you might get trapped with cops coming from all directions.

While you are being pursued by police officers in the open world you are unable to start any races or events, which can be a nuisance when you just want to lose the cops so you can start a race. There is no punishment for being busted by the police outside of races, you simply get re-spawned back where you found the car, so this is often the easiest way to end a chase. You don’t get any of the cool defensive or offensive gizmos from Hot Pursuit either which feels like a missed opportunity. Police chases during races are usually more successful, although sometimes they will appear seemingly out of nowhere to take you down right before the finish line, forcing you to restart the race. They will also lay down spike strips which, apparently, have no impact on your AI opponents. The rubber-banding of the police officers also carries over to these AI opponents, who will appear to be driving oddly fast or slow depending on what you are driving.

Any time you crash in Most Wanted a painfully long ‘crash cam’ shows your car spinning through the air as your competitors blast by. You will become very used to seeing these crashes as they trigger frustratingly frequently and easily. If you side swipe a building or car, sometimes you will glance off and continue going, but other times the game will deem it crash-cam worthy and halt your forward momentum while rubbing your face in its inconsistent ability to determine how bad of a driver you really are. An option to turn this crash-cam off, or being able to judge how big of an impact is necessary to trigger it, would help quell the irritation surrounding this feature.

One area where Most Wanted has improved in its open-world racing design is in the routes of the races themselves. Paradise would give you a start and a finish, and let you figure out the route in between by yourself. This lead to many crashes as you would need to frequently look at your map to ensure you were on the correct route. Most Wanted still allows some freedom but gives you a clear path on your map if you want a straightforward route to follow, and has checkpoints that are easy to see and help you navigate without relying too heavily on your map. The routes the game gives you for races are generally very good, with lots of turns and off-road adventures through scrap yards and industrial parks that make for exciting racing without feeling too linear or constricted.

The single player in Most Wanted sees you driving around the city and completing events to earn ‘most wanted’ points. Once you earn enough points you are able to challenge one of the ‘Most Wanted’ drivers in a one-on-one showdown that you must win to unlock the car of that driver. The weird thing about Most Wanted is that all of the cars, apart from the ten most-wanted ones, are available right from the get go. Some of these cars are very good, far better than the first series of most wanted cars. Once you find a Lamborghini or Maserati, the incentive to go back to one of the game’s slower cars is negligible. This bizarre system negates the sense of progression and accomplishment you normally get from working your way up to the best cars instead of having them available right away.

The cars in Most Wanted are all based on real ones, with the majority of famous super car companies making appearances with the conspicuous exception of Ferrari. Once you find a car lying around, you must complete events in order to unlock upgrades for it. Different races unlock different upgrades, although you must place first or second in an event to obtain them. This system also has its problems, since you are forced to complete specific events, some of which can be rather frustrating, if you want a specific upgrade. Also, each car only has five or six races available for it, so if you find a favourite car you won’t be able to use it for very long unless you enjoy repeating the same races over and over. Once you find and drive some of the faster cars, having to go back to the slower ones just to get points later in the game feels anti-climactic. Fortunately the races against the Most Wanted drivers are a lot of fun, usually involving lengthy and complicated routes and prolonged police chases.

The innovative Autolog feature first introduced in Hot Pursuit has returned, making for some friendly competition assuming you actually have some friends playing the game. Whenever you finish a race, your time is ranked against your friends. There are also traffic cams that record how fast you are going when moving past a certain point, which once again is compared against your friends. One of its more interesting uses involves billboards; if you smash one of the many billboards lying around the city, if any of your friends jumped further when going through it their avatar is displayed on the billboard. So if a friend went further than you did, you get to smash their avatar in an attempt to beat their record. Autolog makes cruising around the city and messing around with jumps and billboards a fairly enjoyable endeavor.

Handling in Most Wanted is fairly similar to Criterion’s previous games; you don’t need to worry much about racing lines or proper cornering, just drift around the corners and blast down the straights, hitting jumps and avoiding traffic. If you were hoping to play Most Wanted with a keyboard you are probably in for some frustration as even a single tap of the button assigned to left or right will result in the car swerving dramatically from one side to the other. The default control layout is also bizarre and unintuitive, especially when dealing with the in-game menu that lets you swap upgrades and select events on the fly. If you have a controller of any description that works with your PC, the in-game menu works great and the handling is good, especially once you upgrade your car with track tires and an aero-dynamic body that increases player control. Once you get used to the fast and loose handling, driving in Most Wanted feels good and gives a great sense of speed.

While the singleplayer’s wacky sense of progression by itself seems illogical, when you pair it with the game’s multiplayer things start making more sense. No matter what mode you play, you gain online levels, which are associated with what cars are made available to you when playing online. The multiplayer in Most Wanted is basically an evolution of challenge mode in Burnout Paradise; a crazed blend of co-operative and competitive races that all revolve around a free-roaming structure. You are dumped into a server with up to 11 other players and told to meet up somewhere. The game then generates a speedlist – a series of events that range anywhere from random challenges such as collectively jumping 4km on a specific jump, to conventional races, to team races. The randomness of the challenges makes for some entertaining gameplay that can also be rather addicting.

While public multiplayer matches can be fun, the game always gives you points for ‘taking down’ other players, i.e. crashing into them so that the crash-cam described earlier initiates. This usually means that a few players on every server ignore the objectives and simply try and crash into you as frequently as possible. Since things like car customization and changes can only be done once in a multiplayer game, and any menus you are in will be interrupted by the crash-cam, sitting still to customize or change your ride can be excruciatingly frustrating as other players repeatedly crash into you. If players are too slow getting to the meet-up zone, the game will inform you that it will teleport everyone there, but sometimes this breaks and the next event never progresses. The game also has your microphone on by default and lacks a push-to-talk option, forcing you instead to mute players individually while in game. Living on the West Coast of Canada, the game’s matchmaking also placed me with European players on an alarmingly regular basis, implying the matchmaking service has limited regard for your whereabouts. Other players’ cars will often warp around unpredictably as a result. If you manage to get a game together with some friends however, the anarchic multiplayer is great fun and rather addictive.

The open city of Most Wanted is a great looking place, with excellent lighting, detailed car models and quality textures. Cars take damage when you crash them, but it is only superficial apart from tires getting popped from spikes strips. Sadly Most Wanted also suffers from some serious performance issues on the PC. While the frame rate is usually solid enough, whenever it dips below sixty, abrupt stuttering and chugging ensues. I experienced this issue on a powerful PC (specs at the end of the review in the performance section), and while turning some settings down reduced the frequency of the issue, I was unable to eliminate it all together, with indoor areas or city centers causing the biggest frame rate drops. Alternatively the frame rate can be locked at 30 via an .ini tweak, but this is less than ideal and causes minor input lag. Until the PC version of Most Wanted is patched to fix this issue, it should be avoided even by those with meaty PC’s.

The sound design in Most Wanted is one of its strongest points, with different cars sounding unique and appropriately powerful. Shooting through a tunnel will cause the sound of your engine to echo in a glorious manner, and crashes are accompanied with suitable screeching and crunching. Sadly the same praise cannot be lavished on the licensed sound track, which consists of an unpleasant mish-mash of mostly low quality pop and rock that will have you hammering the ‘skip track’ button and inevitably turning the music off all together. The option to place your own music in one of the game files to replace the default sound track would be a welcome one. The radio chatter from the police is well done and informative, although it does eventually grow repetitive.

While Most Wanted does provide some of the crazy fast and action packed racing that Criterion is known for, it doesn’t live up to the standard set by their last two games. Progressing through the singleplayer feels unsatisfying as you hop from car to car, with no sense that the vehicles you are driving get better as you go along. Rubber banding cops and AI opponents add to the problems of solo play, and a frustratingly lengthy crash-cam will prove much more prevalent and inconsistent in its initiation than it should be. While there is fun to be had playing Most Wanted with friends online, it is a difficult game to recommend at this point, at least until it has seen a patch or two to fix the performance and iron out some issues with online play.