Need for Speed Most Wanted
is a new game with
a familiar title, bearing more resemblance to Criterion's last major Burnout
game than its namesake. Is this new Most Wanted a true ticket to paradise or
has the Need for Speed worn down to its rims?
Most Wanted is all about open world
discovery. After a very brief tutorial to introduce you to the basics, you're
free to explore the city of Fairhaven and do as you wish. You can search for
billboards to smash, gates to crash, or just get into trouble with the law. The
best part is that nearly every car is out in the wild, just waiting for you to
stumble upon.
Your ultimate goal is to take on
the top 10 Most Wanted cars in Fairhaven, and to do so, you'll have to prove
your worth. Your scores for racing, jumping, and everything else you do
accumulate in a common pool. Tally up a high enough total, and you'll earn the
right to challenge a Shelby Cobra or Lamborghini Aventador in Most Wanted's
equivalent of a boss battle, racing one-on-one while surrounded by unamused
police officers. The object is to win the race and ram your opponent off the
road to claim his ride. Since you earn points for all sorts of activities, you
can play how you want and still challenge the number one driver even if you
haven't seen half of the other races.
As part of the spirit of freedom
and exploration, Criterion has taken a new approach to accessing cars, with
mixed results. Instead of driving to a garage, you can quickly use the control
pad to change cars at any time. In multiplayer, this works great as you can
instantly pop into the car you want. However, in single player, changing cars
warps you back to the spot where you found it, adding up a lot of extra mileage.
Meanwhile, rather than a world
littered with races, events are oddly restricted to the specific car you're
driving. Each car is limited to five set events, after which you'll need to try
another car, and a number of events are repeated among various cars. In all
there are over 60 unique single player events, including races, police
ambushes, and runs to maintain high average speeds. The car selection itself
numbers just about half of what we've come to expect from the series with a
tight list of 41 vehicles that still tries to touch on most tastes, ranging
from a Ford Focus to a 1980s Lamborghini Countach.
Placing first or second in each
race rewards you with mods, granting you nitro, a stronger or lighter chassis,
and gear setups that favor top speed or acceleration. Then, by completing
certain milestones, you can unlock the pro version of that mod, which mitigates
some of its weaknesses. Having to unlock the same set of mods again and again
with each car can get a bit tiring, especially since the race limitations leave
you with no events to put all your mods together.
Oddly enough, even though you
invest so much in your cars and mods in single player, you have to unlock them
all over again once you go online. Cars unlock based on your overall score, so
you still get some credit back for your solo progress, but mods, paint jobs,
and such have to wait until you complete various milestones within multiplayer.
While getting your stuff back
together is a bit of a grind, jumping into online play is quick and efficient
as the game shuffles playlists of varied events. In groups of up to eight
drivers, you'll compete in a series of five events that include solo and team
races, speed tests on set stretches of road, and all manner of challenging
group stunts. Between events, you race to the next start point, and once the
playlist is complete, you'll get a summary of what you've unlocked in that
session and a few minutes break to change things up before the next playlist
starts. You can also create custom playlists, picking from dozens of individual
events, but you'll need to make note of those catchy titles since the menu
doesn't display routes or descriptions of what each event entails.
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