Need for Speed: Most Wanted review

ACT 1, SCENE 1. A dark back-alley.
Enter a GAMER and a SHADY MAN in sunglasses, hat and long coat

Shady Man: ’Ere mate, want some Speed?
Gamer: Oh go on then. I don’t have anything else to do right now.

A transaction takes place. Exeunt

If this exchange seems familiar, it’s probably because you have partaken in the dubious delights of EA’s recent Need for Speed Underground offerings. They’re the kind of games you play furtively in the comfort of your own home, but prefer not to tell anyone aside from the occasional like-minded friend. And Need for Speed Most Wanted is no different.

It would be nice to be able to say that Most Wanted has grown from Underground - matured, shedding that attitude which made you feel dirty all over in the process. It hasn’t, but it has seen the light, despite fitting the franchise’s recipe in a worryingly mass-produced way.

Instant Gaming: Just add speed

The aim of Most Wanted’s career mode will seem rather familiar to anyone who played Underground 2, because it’s basically the same. You arrive in town, in a souped-up car, looking for races, but before long a Mean Man does you Wrong, taking said car in the process.

You start again from scratch with the help of a Hot Girl, and progress through the game by driving like a maniac until you gain enough reputation to challenge the Mean Man and win back your original ride. Yawn. The differences this time are that Most Wanted takes place in daylight, and that driving like a maniac will result in the cops chasing you, just as they did in Hot Pursuit all those years ago.

But I’m being overly harsh. The problems Most Wanted suffers are of a predominately superficial nature, and do not detract from the real focus of the game, which is of course on driving. Here Most Wanted offers a satisfying, albeit familiar range of options, with circuit, knock-out, point-to-point sprint, drag and timed racing modes. The one new addition is Speedtrap, where the aim is to clock up the fastest cumulative speed through a number of locations along the route.

As well as racing, Most Wanted boasts Milestone challenges, along with a free roam mode (with instant access to the races and challenges, as well as stats and car selection by jumping to a safehouse). Complete enough races and milestones, and rack up a sufficiently large bounty - the measure of how wanted you are, and another requisite for career progression - and you get to challenge for the next spot on the Blacklist, whose ascent is Most Wanted’s method of progression.

Races? Check. Unlockables? Check. X-factor? Check. Ker-ching!

This progression occurs quickly at first, but the higher you climb, the more challenges you must complete to reach the next step. Once this point has been reached however, a challenge can be issued to the next Blacklist racer.

Each victory is rewarded with a pair of markers - rewards such as cash, get out of jail free passes, performance and visual upgrades, or even your opponent’s car. New upgrades and cars also become available as you climb, along with access to more of the city, but equally your heat can reach higher levels, making milestone challenges increasingly difficult.

This can of course lead to some extreme frustration later in the game. The challenges take a number of forms - trade paint with a given number of police cars, cause a certain amount of damage to state property, get into a lengthy police chase, avoid roadblocks and so on - whose natures are such that you can often complete more than one at once.

What nearly all have in common is that you will be pursued by police, trying to box you in and arrest you. Escape can be achieved by a combination of clever manoeuvring and using pursuit breakers - roadside obstacles which collapse when rammed, leaving an impassable mass of debris in your wake. With the police out of site you enter Cooldown mode - a period of time after which they lose interest. Cooldown can be sped up by ducking into a secluded hiding place or safehouse, which, along with the pursuit breakers, are marked on the world map.

A heat indicator is also located near the map, showing how much interest the police are taking in you. More heat means more pursuit cars, with higher levels resulting in the deployment of roadblocks, Rhino SUVs to charge and ram you, spikes, and even a patrol helicopter, along with a lengthening of the Cooldown process. This is where the frustration arises - while it is immensely entertaining to make fools out of the cops for a while, pursuits often become lengthy, tiresome and nerve-wracking affairs, as escape is required to complete the Milestones, and keep the bounty you’ve incurred.

Audiovisual experience? Stick it in the pot and stir.

This annoyance aside (or possibly included), Need for Speed Most Wanted is exactly what you expect from an EA game. Graphically solid, it creates a sprawling, believable city and realistically modelled cars, and lacks the baby-oil sheen that so blighted its Underground predecessors.

That Most Wanted takes place in daylight is also a welcome relief, albeit a slightly blinding one at times. An option to disable motion-blurring at high speed would be nice, but you soon get used to the sensation that your eyeballs have melted and are running down your face.

As usual EA have furnished Most Wanted with its Trax system, complete with a large dose of generic rock and hip hop which had me craving the Xbox's ability to create custom soundtracks. With Trax turned off however, the in-game audio is perfectly acceptable. Voice acting fits the mood well, from the arrogant drawl of the Blacklist members to the concerned chatter of police radio. You can listen in on the latter whenever you get involved in a chase, and doing so gives you information on your status, as well as providing a counterpoint to what, to my untrained ear, sounds like the throaty roar of a finely tuned engine.

And this is a rather important point. Need for Speed games are not aimed at people looking for an authentic driving experience. If unrealistic handling bothers you, play Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport, as Most Wanted barely even encourages you to so much as brake.

To add to the arcade feel, the cars are all customisable - performance upgrades are required on even the best cars in order to win races later in the game, and visual modifications are justifiable in that changing a car’s appearance lowers its heat rating, throwing the cops off your tail. It is still possible to turn even the most beautiful cars into garish, aggression-filled behemoths, but at least it isn’t necessary.

Advertise for two months and serve hot!

Outside the career mode, Most Wanted provides instant action races and challenges, and online play, allowing use of all the cars you have created or unlocked, as you would expect. In fact, as you would expect is a decent summary of the entire game - it’s solid with good visuals and enjoyable racing, but it does nothing new. Importantly however, while the PC is not the natural platform for racing games - driving with a keyboard is far inferior to using a pad - Need for Speed Most Wanted will undoubtedly do well for it for two simple reasons.

The first is EA’s ever-present advertising campaign, but just as important is the fact that, while there are a slew of highly successful racing games for consoles, the Need for Speed franchise has been leading the PC racing market almost by default for the last few years. My theory is that die-hard fans of the racing genre will do most if not all of their gaming on consoles, and will therefore have better alternatives. Rather, this game is aimed at those who enjoy the occasional cheap thrill of arcade racing - fans of Underground and those who would have played it but for its distasteful atmosphere. Because in that, as in every other aspect, Most Wanted is slightly better.