The Need for Speed series is one that has deviated quite a bit from its earliest roots. While the series actually originated on the 3DO, it really started to hit the mainstream in a big way with the third game in the series - Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. Doing away with the simulation aspects of the game, reintroducing police chases as a major part of the experience, and giving the game an adrenaline shot of action - Hot Pursuit made quite prodigious use of your scorching fast Voodoo 2 card at a lovely-looking 640x480.
When EA's marketing department later decided to use the lauded series as a vehicle to take advantage of the new car modding scene, it marked a sickening turn in Need for Speed fandom. Instead of racing kick-ass stock muscle cars through cop-infested speed traps, you were racing unintimidating punks in riced out neon-colored go-carts. Some might have thought that the series was lost to the mainstream and their bright green Honda Civics, but with the release of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, it becomes apparent that that isn't the case. Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a marriage of the Underground style and the classic Hot Pursuit gameplay. You play a fairly stereotypical street racer, who in the opening of the game puts his ride on the line in a pink-slip race against the game's villain, Razor. Consistent with his villain status, Razor has his thugs sabotage your car before your big race, and right at the clutch moment in the race, it gives out on you. The cops pick up your sorry car-less ass and run you through the ropes. When you finally emerge, Razor has used your car to get to the top of the Blacklist of street racers, and you're left with squat. The basic gist of the game is that, starting with a kind of crummy car, you work your way back up to the top, rising in the ranks and getting new and more tricked out cars as you go.

The story is cliché, but it pretty well justifies the gameplay, which is a healthy marriage of racing and mischief. Before you can race the next highest member on the Blacklist, you have to prove yourself by meeting a certain number of conditions. This means winning a given number of races, performing a number of audacious feats like smashing through a certain number of police barricades, and racking up a high enough bounty by causing as much destruction as possible. It's a tantalizing mixture of different gameplay types, and it's pretty safe to say that it will satisfy all the different crowds the game is trying to attract.

The new-school car modding fans will find a pretty impressive assortment of the usual street racers, as well as some classics like the Ford GT, that you wouldn't normally mention in the same breath. There's a good degree of customization available, from chrome paint jobs, to gaudy vinyls, to huge spoilers. The game includes an automatic ‘cool-rating' for your car, which seems to steer you towards bulkier, flashier, ugly layouts not unlike what you might see real street racers drive. As you progress you also unlock a bunch of different performance upgrades that are all but necessary to keep your vehicle competitive. You can purchase your vehicles off the lot with the money you get from winning races - but you also have a chance to win your opponent's car in the blacklist races. It's a great incentive for progress, though it's kind of curious that your ability to steal his car is left up to chance, where Razor didn't seem to hesitate.

The gameplay types, as mentioned, are a big improvement over Underground. Doing circuits or time trials is only fun for so long when there's no real danger involved. The fact that the game forces you to instigate fights with the cops is great, as the car chases are among the most fun to be had in the game. It's not hard to evade the 5-0 in the beginning, but the more you destroy, the more heat your car gets. It gets to the point where you can't even drive onto the street without having cops in black and white vipers slamming into you with helicopters circling overheard. The chases also work a lot better than the original Hot Pursuit because you're essentially in an open-ended sandbox environment. You can use your terrain to your advantage, and drive extremely creatively to get the fuzz off your back. There are even special things you can destroy, called pursuit breakers, that will get all the immediate action off your back either by destroying them or forcing them to stop and help innocents caught in the middle of it. It's probably the first time you'll ever have to destroy a donut shop to save your life, and hopefully not the last.

As far as being a graphical showcase for the 360, Most Wanted isn't terribly mind-blowing. The car-models have all been juiced up, but beyond some tidying up with anti-aliasing, it basically looks like an HD copy of the Xbox version. Not that that's anything to thumb your nose at of course, but if you're looking for some reason to roll your eyes about how lazy EA is, that would be your cue. What's perhaps most interesting about the graphical stylings is the inclusion of the bizarrely retro FMV method of story telling. Instead of in-game or pre-rendered cutscenes like we've grown accustomed to, Most Wanted makes use of real actors on your screen. They're heavily visually modified with saturated lighting and some sort of filter, but you get to see the actors delivering every corny line of dialog right on your screen.

It really is surprising that so many divergent elements were all thrown together and still produced a solid, sound racing experience. The old-school cop chases and newer street racing trend are actually a solid combination for gameplay. The story is pretty linear, taking about 15 hours, but it's combined with a toned down free-roaming element drawn from Underground, keeping things in the player's hands. The game uses some old-school graphical techniques and borrows many of the same assets from the last-gen versions of the game, but still looks spectacular in motion on an HD set. Most Wanted is proof that even EA can pull off multi-platform game correctly now and again.

Score: 85%

Jan 8, 2006 | 0 comments
Chris Chester