Need for Speed Most Wanted Review

Criterion Games' Need For Speed: Most Wanted made me forget the disappointment of Black Box's NFS The Run from my first virtual turn of the key. Although it misfires on occasion, this over-the-top arcade racer still plants a silly grin on my face, whether I'm racing AI Corvettes, breaching police roadblocks, or nitrous-boosting past desperate online opponents. It does a lot of things very right.



Set in the fictional city of Fairhaven, Most Wanted offers up a compelling open-world driving environment where you can cruise every corner of a complex network of congested urban streets, high-speed freeways, and narrow mountain roads right from the get-go, without having to laboriously unlock hidden areas as in some past NFS games. Criterion has been similarly generous with a stable of 41 licensed cars to drive recklessly. Wanna drive a Lamborghini Countach 10 minutes after starting? Simply find where someone parked the thing. Acquiring new cars is as easy as discovering each vehicle's "jackspot" location and hopping behind the wheel -- I found this freedom refreshing, but traditionalists may be disappointed in the lack of opportunity to earn their collections.

With reflective wet roads, accelerated day-to-night transitions, and blinding bloom effects (when you exit tunnels into the brilliant sunshine), there's also some serious graphic craftsmanship on display in Fairhaven. I do wish there were an in-cockpit driving view where I could admire that hand-stitched leather Porsche or Maserati wheel, though.

Mileage May Vary

Sadly, I wasn't able to balance that beauty with performance on my somewhat long-in-the-tooth (but requirement-meeting) dual-core CPU and Radeon HD 5800 videocard -- I couldn't get the framerates to climb out of the high teens and low 20s no matter how much de-tuning I performed in the options menu. Oddly, performance for me is identical at the medium and the minimum butt-ugliest settings. Sporadic micro-pauses and screen freezes added further grief, and I've seen other players with more powerful machines voicing similar complaints online. Still, I found it playable and enjoyable. [Editor's Note: We also tried Most Wanted on a Core i7 + Radeon HD 6970 and got hitch-free 45fps performance.)


From my very first burnout, Most Wanted presented an easy driving model that rewards drifting and fast-twitch reaction skills. The cars feel loose yet weighty and, although you can hook up an expensive wheel-and-pedal set for enhanced response, that's overkill for these simplified racing physics -- an Xbox 360 gamepad provided all the control I needed. Damage modeling is purely visual and easily repairable, so I drove around tearing through Fairhaven's styrofoam lampposts, billboards, and stop signs with impunity. Head-on collisions with AI vehicles and immovable structures are similarly non-life threatening, and generate game-pausing cutscenes to showcase Criterions' impressive crash scenes. Heavy shunts will drop you back a few places in a race but, apart from the persistent cinematic interruptions, there are otherwise no serious consequences to driving like a lunatic.

Blink and You'll Miss It

Except for legal consequences, of course. As its name suggests, Most Wanted features a ubiquitous police presence, so moving violations can generate cat-and-mouse chases with the law that will often escalate into city-wide pursuits, complete with road blocks and SWAT involvement. I had some heroic and exciting escapes and brilliant takedowns, but somewhat inexplicably I couldn't relive them through slow-motion replays because Criterion missed the opportunity to include a replay function. I'd also have appreciated the option to turn the bastards off, as the constant pursuits get a little overwhelming at times.


Beyond that "the police are out to get you" thing, the single-player game doesn't feature any backstory or narrative of significance, but one isn't really necessary. It's all about simply driving around discovering new rides and entering them in up to five race events where successful results will earn you automatic upgrades like nitrous boosts, better tires, and long-gear transmissions. There is some rubberbanding with the AI, but it's always in your favor and never too obvious, in that AI drivers seem to mess up more than actually slow down. Shortcuts and alternate paths abound everywhere to make exploration and experimentation rewarding, and with so many secondary activities like Jackspot searches and billboard smashing, I never got too bored. Every racing, speed, jumping, and drifting milestone you set is tracked via the impressive Autolog feature and filed in a comprehensive internal and online database of stats and leaderboards.

Multiplayer Mecca

Most Wanted's elegantly simple, D-pad-actuated Easydrive menu lets you swap and upgrade cars on the fly while also pointing you to available race events. Successes help build Speedpoints that'll ultimately qualify you to take on Fairhaven's 10 most-wanted racers in mano-a-mano contests with full police presence. Evade the cops and beat your nemesis, and you not only take over his ride but also his ranking on the city's most wanted list. This adds variety to the core "find-and-upgrade-car" dynamic sans the overdramatic FMV storytelling of past NFS chapters like Carbon and Underground.


With 123 Jackspots to unearth -- and five subsequent races per vehicle -- there's significant depth here, but the process got tiresome for me a dozen or so cars in. Once I'd acquired and upgraded a 200-mph carbon fiber Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, there was little incentive to apply the same effort to a Ford Focus ST. Thankfully, Most Wanted also features an infectiously entertaining multiplayer component that, like the single-player game, is devoid of lobbies and intrusive menus. After logging on to the Origin servers (Origin is mandatory, by the way), it throws you into a free-driving and fast-populating pool of 12 online players with GPS directions to a meet point somewhere on the Fairhaven map. Once you arrive, you can sit quietly and await the start, or arbitrarily smash into other players' cars for additional Speedpoints.

No Speed Bumps

First-timers will probably feel some confusion at the beginning of these things because, whether it's a straightforward race, a drifting competition, or team-based event, there's not much time to figure out the rules. I messed up spectacularly in my first few events until I got into the flow of things, but I fell in love with the simple refinement of it all in less than an hour. There are no boring lobbies to wade through and no interminable load screens, just endlessly entertaining and unique multiplayer-specific events to drive to and enjoy. This is multiplayer done right.


I had a blast playing Need For Speed: Most Wanted, and I expect to keep that feeling alive through many more single and multiplayer dustups. Keeping the Need For Speed legacy alive and fresh is no mean feat, but Criterion has succeeded admirably here. It may not reinvent the wheel, but Most Wanted certainly gives it a nice clean polish.