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Publisher Electronic Arts
Developer
Released: October 30, 2012 |
System Requirements: |
What We Liked: What We Didn't: The Final Score: (?) |
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Need for Speed: Most Wanted [Limited Edition] Be careful when searching for news and reviews for Need for Speed: Most Wanted, as you are like to get confused with EA Canada’s game of the same name released in 2005. I’m still not sure why EA didn’t come up with something a bit more original rather than reusing a former title from the same generation of console. This time Criterion is doing the reboot, and after their fantastic debut in 2010 with Hot Pursuit that proved Burnout and NFS could be successfully merged, I think everyone was pretty excited to see how this latest racer would turn out. It certainly impressed us earlier this year at E3 where it earned our Best Racing game award, and it turned out to be incredibly fun on the Xbox 360, but how about that PC port? For those who prefer to do their racing on something newer than a 7-year old console, the PC version of Most Wanted is certainly the better route to go when it comes to graphics, performance, and overall technically prowess. While the Frostbite 2 engine is admittedly “pretty” on the console, especially in games like Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor when you tack on an HD patch, make no mistake that when running on a quality PC, you won’t find a better looking or performing PC racer than Most Wanted. And when played with a steering wheel or controller the gameplay experience is nearly identical to console, while your visuals and performance become exponentially better.
Each car comes with its own set of race events that range in difficulty as well as prizes. The Most Wanted economy doesn’t rely on cash or credits. The only thing you worry about are Speed Points that you earn for winning races, smashing billboards, tripping speed trap cameras, or smashing into cops. Speed Points are the XP of Most Wanted and as they increase, so does your respect level, and when you reach certain tiers you will be allowed to race the top ten most wanted drivers in the city. Defeat them and take their car and their rank until you are the #1 most wanted in Fairhaven. When you get a new car it will be fairly stripped down, but by winning races you can earn all sorts of upgrades like new tires, nitro boost, specialty gearboxes, weight reductions, and structural boosts to limit damage. Different parts are awarded for placing in first and second and if you come in first you get all the loot, which can then be selectively applied to your car. If you are racing on dirt you might want off-road tires, or if you are racing on the highway you’ll want the long gearbox. It’s a surprisingly easy system to grasp while adding tremendous strategy to many of the events. All of the car mods as well as race selection and GPS navigation is handled through the nifty Easy Drive interface that drops down from the corner with a few presses of the D-pad to choose and lock in your options. The PC version loses the cool ability of voice commands using the 360 Kinect, but those only worked for me about half the time anyway when playing the console version, so no great loss. As you might have guessed from the name, cops play a major part of the game, not only in trying to bust up your actual race events but even patrolling the streets while you are sightseeing between those events. Violate a traffic law in sight of a cop and your wanted level moves up a notch and the chase is on. Escaping the cops is merely a matter of getting out of their circle of detection and staying out of sight until your wanted level cools down. This gets harder to do if you created some havoc along the way and got your wanted level up to 4 or 5 and got SWAT involved. Cops get crazy-aggressive and will ram you off the road, setup strategic roadblocks, or lay down spike strips. Your more advanced upgrades will allow you to smash through these road blocks and even re-inflate your punctured tires.
With great freedom comes great responsibility and it’s up to you to seek out the cars and the races. There is no hidden back-end menu of events. You’ll want to drive over every square inch of highway, city street, and back alley, and find all the cars and at least hop in them for a moment to mark their location on the map. Exasperation can even turn into frustration when you think you found your perfect ride in that Lamborghini then turn the corner to find a sexy convertible Audi waiting with fresh new events. There is so much to do with 200+ events, not to mention speed trap cameras that will log your top speed and compare with your friends on Autolog. You also get to smash billboards that will get replaced with your Origin gamer ID and photo as well as crashing special security gates for bonus SP. There is great emphasis on social competition thanks to the brilliant Autolog system and all of these mini-challenges. Multiplayer is seamlessly integrated into the single-player world, allowing you to carve you own private version of the city and compete with up to eight racers in special lists of races and challenges, and when you are racing in a series of events you even get to race to the starting line of the next event. Bottom-line; there is a lot of social competition available, even when your friends aren’t online. And by using EA Origin as a universal backend, all SP earned in any version of the game contributes to your singular Autolog profile score. The only caveat with Autolog and online racing would be just how many of your friends are playing this on the PC versus the more accessible and popular Xbox 360 or PS3. You can brag all day about your killer framerates and enhanced texture detail, but if all your friends are playing on Xbox Live or PSN then you are bragging to no one. If you are in this mainly for the solo experience then the PC is certainly the way to go, but for those looking to get all “social”, you pretty much have to follow the pack, at least until they can bridge the shared data gap between PC and console. The presentation for Most Wanted is striking with a visual style that embodies The Matrix and Inception. Each race event is prefaced with an intro movie (that you can skip on future replays) that shows off the city in some mind-tripping fashion and always ends with you starting the race at full speed. Graphically, the city is massive and densely populated with traffic and loaded with architectural diversity and detail. Like most open-world games, the more you drive around the more you start to learn the lay of the land and discover hidden routes, ramps, tunnels, etc. Much can be smashed and there is cosmetic car damage and slow-motion wrecks that come close to the carnage of Burnout fame. The PC version offers enhanced textures, draw distances clear to the horizon, fluid framerates, and explosive details in the crashes and car damage. Any issues I had with hiccups on the 360 version have been eliminated on the PC. The music selection is equally as visionary with techno and club beats as well as the now-obligatory dubstep. There are no radio stations as such, but you can adjust the track list in the options. Sound effects range from diverse engine noises to earthshattering wrecks that explode in a shower of glowing particle effects all seal the deal in this impressive stereo or surround mix.
I didn't see any rubber banding and racer AI is just as aggressive as the cops, so any wreck in the later part of a race will almost guarantee you won’t come in first. Restarting a race on the PC is lightning fast – near instantaneous as opposed to the 20-30 reload on the console, even after installing to the hard drive. Other than the limited race views that make driving these cars harder than need be, Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a terrific racing game that is only better on the PC, and for those of you who have somehow managed to learn to drive from behind the car, you won't have any problems at all, and who knows…maybe they will patch in a hood view for the rest of us. The Limited Edition gets you a few perks like four hours of Double SP and early access to a couple of cars on top of the 40+ already in the game. There is so much to do in this game, and the fact that you can do it alone, online with friends, or just socially compete using all those Autolog challenges means you won’t be parking this game on the shelf anytime soon. Screenshots 
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Most Wanted takes a few daring risks with the way we approach and play open-world racers, and they pull it off with great success. This is easily one of the coolest ranking and progression systems I’ve seen in a next-gen racer. After a brief tutorial you are left to explore the city of Fairhaven at your leisure - go where you want and do what you want. The entire city is open from the start as are all 40+ vehicles…you just have to find them first. These hot rides are scattered all over the massive city map, and to drive one you only need pull up alongside and hit Y to swap cars.
Your car has a certain amount of damage it can take before you wreck or are taken down by the police. This can be restored by driving through garages, which also fills your nitro and repaints your car. If done while no one is watching you can lower your wanted level a notch, otherwise you’ll hear the police chatter calling out your new car color. And if you don't keep moving the cops will bust you and you'll restart back at the police impound lot.
My one and only complaint is the same one I had on the Xbox 360; that being that Most Wanted only offers two driving views; a chase camera and a bumper camera. There is no cockpit camera and no hood camera. This is totally unacceptable in this day and age, especially for a game that supports a steering wheel. I can't remember the last racing game that at least didn't have a hood camera. I find it completely impossible to drive from behind the car – the steering is too twitchy and imprecise, and while the bumper cam has been okay in past racing games, the camera in Most Wanted is so low to the ground it is nearly unplayable. The only thing that saves it on the PC is the added level of sharpness and the extended draw distance, so there are far fewer surprises and race-ending crashes. I’m still mad about the limited views, but it’s not as big an issue on the PC.
