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Giant Bomb Review

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Need for Speed: Most Wanted Review

4
  • X360
  • PC

If you're looking for a multiplayer driving game that's about way more than simple races, Most Wanted's speedlist system makes for an amazingly good time.

The cops are probably the least interesting part about Most Wanted.
The cops are probably the least interesting part about Most Wanted.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted might not have the name on the box, but it's essentially a mini-sequel to Burnout Paradise. Criterion has taken a lot of the ideas from its last big open-world racing game and sharpened them up a bit. As the type of person who put hundreds of hours into Burnout Paradise, I find this to be a very exciting prospect, indeed. While the ideas behind Most Wanted are mostly sound, sometimes the execution of its solo gameplay is decidedly less so. Yet the multiplayer side takes all those learnings from Burnout Paradise and runs with them in some incredible ways. The end result is a game with some amazing moments and enough little issues to make you constantly wish that it was slightly better, slightly smoother, and (on consoles) slightly cleaner.

But let's start with what Most Wanted actually is. It's an open world racing game with a single-player mode that is very different from its multiplayer, but they're united by a shared player progression. In single-player mode, the object is to take on the 10 cars that make up the "Most Wanted List." In order to unlock those 10 races, you'll need to earn experience points, which are gained in other races. With the exception of the "Most Wanted" cars themselves, no vehicles are doled out to you as you progress. Instead, every car is tucked away in a few spots around the world. These "jack spots" let you drive up to these parked cars and press a button to switch. Each car has five races assigned to it, and completing these earn you experience points and unlock car modifiers, like off-road tires that help you maintain control when you're not on the streets, or a reinforced chassis that lets you maintain control after a collision with another racer or cop. That's not to say that there are five unique races for every car, though, as plenty of them repeat. But the unlocks are car-specific, so if you're bent on doing everything you'll need to find every car and complete all five races with every car.

Putting the aero body on your car lets you catch more air, useful for taking some high scores.
Putting the aero body on your car lets you catch more air, useful for taking some high scores.

The cars themselves handle well in a loose, fun way that feels a lot like Burnout Paradise. Tapping the brakes sets your car adrift, letting you get long, smooth slides around sharp corners, often while simultaneously using your nitrous boost to actually gain speed while sliding out. The fastest cars require tight turning abilities and even tighter reaction times from the player to help dodge oncoming traffic, highway dividers, and the like. Once you get used to its specific style of driving, it's positively excellent.

While the bulk of the single-player events are only open to a few cars, the Most Wanted races themselves are open to any vehicle, and you can use a handy in-game menu to change cars or mods at any time. But, for whatever reason, changing cars doesn't let you change cars on the spot. You can only warp to one of the areas where that car is parked. So changing cars on the fly isn't really an option, which is annoying in cases where you want to switch to a faster car because you just found a billboard, speed camera, or some other optional piece of the world that you want to blast through.

The name Most Wanted also implies that the police will be involved, and sure enough, they'll pop up with increasing frequency as you work your way through the game. Some events simply have police encounters programmed into them, forcing you to deal with the law as you race and escape them once the race is complete. You can also get into free-drive scuffles with the law if they see you driving fast... which happens all the time. The police aspect of Most Wanted feels tossed in and largely out of place, especially when you're just trying to bang out some races and unlock mods for your current car. You can't start race events or warp to other cars while a pursuit is in progress. While you can typically speed away from a pursuit just as it's started and get away without much trouble, if you get mired in a longer chase that started during a previous event, the fastest way out is usually to just let yourself get caught. There's no penalty for that--in fact there are in-game milestones built upon getting busted--though the game forcibly warps you back to your current car's parking spot once that happens. If you're right near the next event or trying to hunt down collectibles, this is pretty much just a pain in the ass.

Ultimately, though, the real issue with the single-player is that it feels a little empty. The world feels small and lifeless. Aside from an announcer coming on and giving a speech that is deliberately similar to the one found in Burnout Paradise when you first start playing, the only other chatter you hear comes during police chases. But the police radio dialogue is almost immediately repetitive, adding the tedium I felt whenever the law got involved. On top of that, it isn't particularly long or in-depth, so unless you're bent on upgrading every car, you'll reach a million experience points and be able to complete the final Most Wanted race in around six or seven hours.

Though you'll see plenty of cops during some pursuits, it never turns into the Blues Brothers or anything like that.
Though you'll see plenty of cops during some pursuits, it never turns into the Blues Brothers or anything like that.

Thankfully, the game has multiplayer, and the online side of Need for Speed: Most Wanted is amazing. Rather than just dump you into yet another series of races, Most Wanted is more like the challenge modes found in Burnout Paradise with some proper racing mixed in. The events join together to form "speedlists," which group five different events together. These are served up at random in public matches, but you can configure your own lists for private matches. The events vary from group activities, like asking all the players to perform drifts around a landmark until the total drift yardage reaches a certain number. Or individual feats of skill, like seeing who can get the longest jump off of a specific ramp. But these have a twist. If you're taken out by another player while trying to hit that longest jump, your last score is frozen and you're effectively eliminated from the event, leaving you to just try to screw it up for the other players by taking them out. So it's a viable strategy to get a good, long jump and then just park on the ramp to mess up other players. It's dirty.

Even the racing has a wicked, filthy edge to it. Between events, you're asked to drive to the next meet up spot so that all players are in the same basic location when the next event starts. When that event is a race, it doesn't line you all up into some sort of formal starting grid. As soon as the GPS line appears on your map and you know which direction you're supposed to take, you're free to start moving in the basic direction of the first checkpoint, timer be damned. Even the drive to the meet up point has a bit of competition to it, as the player that gets there first gets a little bit of XP. At the end of the five-event group, the scores are tallied, a winner is declared, and you're ready for the next set.

Though the pool of experience points you earn is used across multiplayer and the solo portion of Most Wanted, the two sides of the game handle unlocks completely differently. Rather than finding cars in the world, in multiplayer you unlock more cars when you gain a level, and mods for those cars are earned by driving and performing well in those specific vehicles. So you might earn track tires for driving a car for five miles or an aero body kit for jumping a set number of yards. "Pro" versions of these perks are also unlockable later on. And since the game uses the same XP count for both modes, playing online is a good way to unlock the Most Wanted races in single-player, and if you've been playing a bunch of single-player, you'll have a bunch of new cars to choose from the next time you get in a game with other people.

No front plate, but your rear license plate is customizable like a Call of Duty playercard.
No front plate, but your rear license plate is customizable like a Call of Duty playercard.

The Xbox 360 version of the game is a little hitchy, with an unstable frame rate that takes supreme dives whenever there are a lot of cop cars on-screen. It also looks a little blurry at the horizon, which in a game where dodging oncoming traffic at insane speeds is the order of the day can cause some issues of its own. The PC version, predictably, has none of these issues. It looks great at high resolutions and, assuming you've got a machine that can handle it, the frame rate is terrific. Ultimately, though, this is a multiplayer game that you'll enjoy most with friends, and you should probably play it where your friends will play it... just try to convince them all that the PC version is the way to go, if you hold that sort of sway over your peers.

It's also worth noting that Most Wanted might be the first game I've seen that justifies the existence of EA's Origin service, as it syncs your point total across all platforms, including the Vita version. This means that if you finish the game on one platform, you'll have enough points to immediately open the main races in single-player on another platform, but more importantly your multiplayer progress will carry over. I don't know that I'd recommend that people play the game on multiple platforms, but if you're planning on playing the portable version as well as its "big" counterpart, it's pretty cool to not have to unlock all those cars in both places.

It's a shame that the single-player portion of Most Wanted isn't more exciting, but it's still pretty good because the handling makes the cars enjoyable to just drive around, regardless of what you're doing. But if you're looking for a solid, lengthy solo campaign from a driving game, this isn't what you're looking for. Most Wanted is a multiplayer-first game, and taken in that context, few games do it better than this.

Jeff Gerstmann on Google+

92 Comments

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PhantomGardener

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Edited By PhantomGardener

What if I'm not "looking for a multiplayer driving game that's about way more than simple races"?

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IAmNotBatman

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Edited By IAmNotBatman

@radion_null said:

Here I was hoping Jeff would review the PS3 version as it "crossplays" with the Vita version. I actually wanted to see if that was a good selling point. But oh well!

Pretty much all early review copies that are sent early to reviewers are the 360 version and have been for a few years now. If they wanna get their reviews out while people are still looking for them, they play what they're given, although it would be cool to see that feature looked at as a little add-on to the review!

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xshinobi

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Edited By xshinobi

After playing for a little over 2h. This game is nothing but a lesson in frustration,

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namesonkel

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Edited By namesonkel

Weird. Cops were the best part of the previous Most Wanted. Good that they're there in any case.

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ripelivejam

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Edited By ripelivejam

also sad that this is very close to burnout paradise, least favorite after Takedown :(

RIP classic Burnout gameplay

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radioactivez0r

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Edited By radioactivez0r

I'm running an i7-3750K and a 560Ti and I didn't have any performance problems last night, and I haven't updated my drivers since...Guild Wars 2? I did find that having to win the same mods for every car you get seems really overkill (the second car I got bummed me out), and losing the cops is a real pain. They are pretty good drivers, and if you manage to escape and start driving normally during your cooldown period, which can take a while if you are at Heat Level 5+, any cop that comes within 500 yards lights you up and you start running again. After 10 minutes of that I gave up and let them bust me. The MP was actually really fun, though.

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OldManLight

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Edited By OldManLight

biggest bummers for me, are that the cars don't crumble up the way they did in burnout paradise and that the game seems to have a knack for placing slow moving vehicles directly into your path when you're drifting at high speeds around blind corners. I call BS on the "randomness" of the latter here.

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bwooduhs

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Edited By bwooduhs

Would love to be playing this but there's just not enough time. Oh well at least it will be cheap when i get around to it...

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jstaunton

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Edited By jstaunton

@Winternet said:

Well, guess I won't be playing any driving games this year.

yup

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Goronmon

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Edited By Goronmon

The fact that it's literally the same title as an earlier and a very similar game overall annoys me enough to want to avoid this game entirely.

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DBrim

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Edited By DBrim

I played about 200 hours of Burnout: Paradise's multiplayer. I'm pretty stoked for this game. The hurricane delayed shipment, but I can't wait to tear into this tomorrow.

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mbdoeden

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Edited By mbdoeden

@ucankurbaga:

- Bad car handling

Subjective, I find the handling to be fantastic. It's straight up Burnout.

- Poor PC optimization

From what I've seen on many forums this is probably true.

- No sense of progression

Not true. Every car in multiplayer and singleplayer has progression tied to it via upgrades (car mods) and races. Although, the races are not specific to every single car.

- The cops and most wanted list seems pointless

I agree, but as Jeff said, this game is multiplayer first and when the cops are involved in random races it adds another element of strategy/tension that makes the game better (when used properly). In singleplayer the cops do feel forced and kinda dumb.

- No cutscenes or characterization of most wanted list like in previous game

Eh, whatever. Do we really need poorly designed characters in this arcade style racing game?

- No visual upgrades for cars

True. That does kinda suck. Your only way of visually (as far as I know) distinguishing yourself from others online is with your license plates, and those are on the same unlock/progression path as everyone else.

I am really suprised its getting high scores all around. I guess people felt sorry for EA after bashing MoH Warfighter to the ground and gave this game good score to make up for it...

Oh come the fuck on dude.

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JJOR64

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Edited By JJOR64

I'm sad that the single player isn't great. Might end up waiting for a price drop for this game now.

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Hardtarget

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Edited By Hardtarget

reaaaaaaally glad I decided to jump on Forza Horizon instead. Multiplayer is fun and all but I'm always looking for a great SP experience first and this does not appear to have it (and I LOVE the single player experience of Horizon)

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Meteor_VII

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Edited By Meteor_VII

Glad to know I don't have to buy this. I wanted a new Most Wanted game not burnout paradise redux.

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AnEternalEnigma

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Edited By AnEternalEnigma

I endorse any game that has "jack spots".

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Jahbu

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Edited By Jahbu

Man I'm loving this game! Check out my gameplay vid if you get a chance!

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ArtisanBreads

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Edited By ArtisanBreads

Disappointing. I may now wait a while on this game. I'm totally a single player guy and the single player sounds really boring. A true shame because I am a huge Criterion fan.

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Flubagalub

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Edited By Flubagalub

@Begilerath said:

So which is better? Need for Speed: Most Wanted or Need for Speed: Most Wanted?

Well Need for Speed: Most Wanted is almost as good as Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, whereas Need for Speed: Most Wanted is only about as good as Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

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beard_of_zeus

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Edited By beard_of_zeus

So, after some thought, I ended up buying both this and Forza today (and got Prof. Layton for free! Yay "buy 2, get 1 free"!). Haven't played Forza yet, but I'm enjoying Most Wanted more than I thought. The MP is still super fun, even if you just join public matches with random folks.

My only big complaints are a) The cops are extremely difficult to evade once you get up a couple heat levels and b) having to unlock mods for each individual car is a bummer.

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McShank

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Edited By McShank

@Flubagalub said:

@Begilerath said:

So which is better? Need for Speed: Most Wanted or Need for Speed: Most Wanted?

Well Need for Speed: Most Wanted is almost as good as Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, whereas Need for Speed: Most Wanted is only about as good as Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted may refer to:

http://www.giantbomb.com/need-for-speed-most-wanted-5-1-0/61-11445/

There are now 3 of the same games.. lets see someone else do this!

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swiller

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Edited By swiller

As a multi-console owner it's pretty sad that journalists never play the PS3 version of multiconsole game (let alone now not even mentioning it).

I always go for the best version and I know the Ctiteron's other games like Burnout Paradise was better on the PS3 vs 360. Guess I will have to find this info elsewhere?

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MikeinSC

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Edited By MikeinSC

I'm getting a strong Forza Horizon vibe off of this. Looks amazing, however.

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VRMN

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Edited By VRMN

Well, I just got the game and one thing stood out to me in the review:

"You can't start race events or warp to other cars while a pursuit is in progress."

I just finished a race where you end in pursuit and, with zero issues whatsoever, pulled the menu down, pulled the race, and restarted, without getting out of pursuit. Maybe you can't start race events on the map while a pursuit is happening, which is still an issue, but restarting -- an issue expressly identified by Jeff in the quick look -- is not part of it.

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Max21

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Edited By Max21

Nice review Jeff, definitely picking this up.

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Deltan

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Edited By Deltan

I played the shit out of Hot Pursuit (S-Ranked in fact including DLC). One thing I miss from these games that the PS2 had, is local couch multiplayer, split screen action. Appears this is lacking such functionality as well. Lately as I get older, spend more time gaming only in the company of friends, I am missing the couch multiplayer games of yore.

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honkyjesus

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Edited By honkyjesus

Plays more fun than Horizon imo. The audio in the game is amazing. That being said, I wouldn't buy this at more than thirty bucks right now.

Seems like everything I play is just making me yearn for BioShock Infinite more.

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Andy_117

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Edited By Andy_117

I would be more excited about this, but Forza Horizon just seems so much cooler. I fell in love with Criterion's Hot Pursuit, though, as well as Burnout Paradise; I just don't play enough racing games to justify not choosing between Horizon and Most Wanted, and given that it is a choice, I'd choose Horizon.

I just don't play multiplayer enough for this. Horizon at least has meaty single-player content to back-up the multiplayer hi-jinks. It's kind of a shame these games released so close to each other actually, but I guess they both had to pick a release window before the Assassin's Creed/Halo 4/Black Ops II one-two-three punch.

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geirr

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Edited By geirr

Dammit, I'm too stuck up to touch Origin and I don't want to dust off the 360 and my PS3 is too noisy.

So troubled.

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nutta27

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Edited By nutta27

I changed my pre order from PC to Xbox. I'm starting to think that was a mistake but I really don't want to arse around with Origin

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Stahlbrand

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Edited By Stahlbrand

Hmmm, I feel like Hot Pursuit was more what I was looking for, as far as police-interaction goes, and particularly playing both roles. Looks like a good game, but I'm glad I spent my 'buy a racing game in 2012' budget on Forza Horizons.

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deactivated-64b64e84c301d

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I'm disappointed. This is Burnout Paradise with less content but with police chases and some bad ideas added in. Why does it exist? I could play Hot Pursuit for better police driving with both sides playable, Burnout Paradise for more or less the same game without real world cars or Forza Horizon for slightly more realistic racing.

I expect a Need For Speed "street" game to have cars you can modify in ridiculous ways and deeper progression. Give me a cheese ridden story with Razor Callahan over a ten second monologue and lots of artsy camera spins.

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WickedCobra03

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Edited By WickedCobra03

Eh, I really don't have much of a PC anymore, and I have hated the idea of Origin from the get go, but if it is actively trying new things without pushing their garbage policies on their userbase, I guess I am for that. I think I might see how this game goes on Black Friday... if its like $30 or something, I might pick it up, otherwise, I will wait until it hits $20. I have seen from the past that most of my time is spent in Single-Player with only a bit of online here and there, and if the online is the main draw, I will just sit this one out for a few weeks or possibly 18 months until it dips in price.

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graf1k

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Edited By graf1k

After about 2 hours with the game I am seriously at a loss for words. I know that is not a lot of time, but this is coming from someone who put 90+ hours into Paradise between single player and online and really enjoyed Criterion's first take on NFS. The game thus far feels like the worse mash up of Paradise and Hot Pursuit I could have imagined. You'd think adding the police and quality racing of Hot Pursuit to the over the top crashes and jumps of Paradise would be a marriage made in heaven but so far it just feels like Criterion and EA would have been better off picking one or the other than combining the two for a watered down version of each.

The crashes suck, probably because like Jeff said in the bombcast this week they had to tone them down because of the licensed cars. Running from the cops is more of a hassel than anything because unlike Hot Pursuit, I get flagged by the cops just driving around the city going to events or looking for billboards which is just annoying. Not to mention that in just 2 hours of playing I don't think I've gone 5 minutes without being pursued.

Then there is the world itself. It just doesn't feel like an open world. The majority of the time I'm driving around being chased by the cops looking for a way to evade them, there is one, maybe two ways I can go, and that's it. Maybe Paradise wasn't as open as I remember but it didn't ever feel as small as Most Wanted because I wasn't looking for a way to get away from the cops. Not only that, but for a racing game, the world feels poorly planned. Paradise City always felt very streamlined to me, so that I only really crashed when there was a lot of traffic or I just didn't break properly when trying to make a hard turn at incredibly high speeds. In Most Wanted I'm crashing every 2-3 minutes because there is always a pillar, or an edge sticking out or something. Between all that shit, the traffic cars, and psychotic, ever-present police in the game, it's impossible to ever get the feeling of break-neck speed that Paradise had.

Lastly, and I hope this is just me having come off Forza Horizon, but the handling just seems terrible so far. It's some kind of shit-sandwich hybrid of Burnout's precise yet psychics-defying controls and something more realistic but certainly not sim-like. In Paradise for example, I could drift around corners while avoiding traffic in such a fluid manner that it felt effortless and made you feel like a badass when you and a bunch of friends are just drifting up a huge hill only to barrel roll off it 10 seconds later. In Most Wanted though, the tap-the-breaks-to-drift seems to just not register at the worst times and the handbreak is only useful if you're going 150mph and need to make a turn of 45 degrees or more instantly. Otherwise it just kills all your momentum.

Even without a game like Horizon, I think Most Wanted would feel like some kind of terrible hybrid of Criterion's last two games, but the excellence of Horizon just makes the warts of MW just that much more visible and frustrating. Hopefully after this EA lets Criterion get back to making true Burnout games because I have zero interest in another NFS game, even if God himself is the dev on it.

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deactivated-631f5ebbad058

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I already played this game. 5 years ago. It was called Burnout Paradise. Why would I want a smaller, inferior version of that, exactly, where the only improvements have been made are to multiplayer, and most of the rest is worse? Shouldn't the expectation for a follow-up include words like "bigger" and "better"?

Oh right, EA. I'm sorry Criterion, I'm so sorry. Run while you have the chance.

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budsaq

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Edited By budsaq

I live in San Francisco... the term "jackspots" means something completely different here.

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Snakepond

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Edited By Snakepond

I think a 4 is way too generous. I popped in the game this weekend on 360 and there something wrong with this game. The frame rate drops constantly and the single player progression is the worst design in a car game I have ever played. Instead of building up to the elite cars you have to go find them and then when you do they repeat the same events. This is no way a burnout paradise sequel.

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agentgray

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Edited By agentgray

@graf1k Jeff's review was good but your assessment was spot on. I have never been so frustrated playing a game. It's like they took all the frustrations of Mario Kart and enhanced them. The cop cars being built like tanks and running up to speed (out of character)...and then there is the fact they takedown at random and without warning. Not fun. Actually the entire cop-chase mechanic is not fun. Your own cars are brittle and getting their upgrades is an exercise in frustration. Single player is a complete and utter waste. However, the multiplayer is fantastic, but alas, I don't usually play online.

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graf1k

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Edited By graf1k

@agentgray: Exactly. The cops ended up sucking the fun out of the game. Not only are they built like tanks (even with a crazy durable car and the mods that make it more durable, it's nigh impossible to go through an SUV roadblock without wrecking) but as soon as you get into cool down cops spawn in front of and behind you constantly. As if that wasn't bad enough, going through a repair shop and having your car sprayed will only lower your wanted meter ONE BAR! So if I'm in a level 4 pursuit, I have to drive through the stupid thing FOUR TIMES to completely lose the cops. It's ridiculous.

Then, to top it all off, the variety of events is terrible. If you do the 5 events per car to get all the upgrades for that car, after about 5-10 of the 40ish cars nearly all the events for the subsequent cars are just repeat events in a different car. They don't even play differently based on the characteristics of the car. I remember one event specifically for either the Caterham or the Ariel Atom and after getting wrecked the entire race, I decided to go for flat out speed and acceleration on the next try and applied my upgrades accordingly. Didn't matter at all. All the big lumbering cars were still just as fast as me thanks to the bullshit rubberbanding and then they would just smash right into me. So then I decided to try making my car as durable as possible. Again, didn't matter. I still got the shit knocked out of me and the other cars were still the same speed as me almost the entire time, not faster or slower. It's really dumb. I did end up S-ranking it but only because I'm very stubborn and having zero interest in Halo 4 or BLOPS 2, I didn't really have anything else to play until AC3 came in.

That said, I have some tips that may keep the pain and frustration to a minimum. First and foremost, if you care about achievements and want the one for getting first in all events in all cars, YOU DON'T NEED TO. Just get first in each event once and you'll unlock it. Any race you can start instantly from the quick menu is one you've already raced so just make sure you get first. That will cut down your event list by at least 60%. Secondly, do the events in the order they give, top to bottom. Doing the last race first is just asking for frustration. It's certainly possible to win this way but it's just more frustration than it's worth. Lastly, in a race wreck the SHIT out of the other racers and use nitro as much as possible. It seems to break the rubberbanding. In Ambushes, if it starts you out facing west, drive east. If it starts you out south, drive north. Seriously, it's so much easier this way. It's like they didn't plan for U-turns.

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MrKlorox

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Forgot to mention how completely fucked the PC version is. If you use your PC as anything other than a gaming rig and use more than one monitor, DO NOT BUY. This game won't even launch far enough to create its config files the first time if you have a secondary monitor. What a total piece of shit. Anybody who got this for "free" for buying Sim City, EA just fucked you twice.