Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012) Review

Need For Speed... how much meaning there used to be in those words... about five years ago. Now, Need For Speed has become synonymous with how not to make racing games. Showiness, pretentiousness, worn-out clichés—all of this has become deeply ingrained in the latest games of the series. And Most Wanted (2012) is yet another confirmation of that.

Surprisingly, the creators of Hot Pursuit (2010) failed to deliver energetic, long races of 20 kilometers and spectacular, heated chases with explosions and dozens of wrecked police cars. All the player gets from Most Wanted (2012) is limited to dull races with “rubberbanding”[1] and relentless cops, from whom it’s nearly impossible to escape.

Of course, you can’t say the game flopped like Undercover, which it’s often compared to, but the cut potential puts the player into a sleepy realm of boring races. After the hot and dynamic Hot Pursuit (2010), all Criterion had to do was transfer all the driving excitement and beautiful supercars to the streets, spicing up the races with spectacular police car crashes. Unfortunately, the developers abandoned the craziness in favor of realism—but who needs realism in an arcade racer?

We want to have fun, smash up police cars while driving through exploding gas stations, check out beautiful models, beat show-off street racers on long tracks, and try out tuned supercars. That’s exactly what Need For Speed has been about ever since Underground. After trying The Run and Most Wanted (2012), it feels like the developers never actually play the games they make. Otherwise, they’d shoot themselves out of boredom that reigns in the streets of Fairhaven.

It’s hard to call something a racing game if it doesn’t have a garage and workshops. But in the case of Most Wanted (2012), Easy Drive is exactly the kind of innovation that deserves praise. Quick access to cars and races, tuning and customizing your car right from the game menu—this definitely cuts out the routine. Want to switch cars? Just press a couple of buttons. Need more maneuverability instead of power? No problem, open three or four menus and voilà!

Car handling is similar to what it was in Hot Pursuit 2010, but it takes some getting used to. However, cars from Porsche, Ford, and a few other manufacturers can only be described as “sliding bricks.” This is a flaw the developers need to fix with the very first patch, otherwise the game will be completely unbalanced.

And now for the bad stuff. Whose idea was it to keep the crash cutscenes? Seriously, you’re driving at... 50 km/h and another car barely grazes your side. BOOM! CRASH-BANG! ACCIDENT! They show you a five-hour-long cutscene, and a torrent of curses rains down on the game and its developers. This completely useless feature has been screwing gamers over for three games in a row. Haven’t they figured out in three years that things like this only get in the way of comfortable gameplay, and that cutscenes should be reserved for more spectacular events?

Police chases are completely pointless... or maybe Criterion designed this mode specifically for masochists. The thing is, there are no destructible gas stations, bakeries, or TV towers in the game. It’s very hard to get away from the cops, there’s nowhere to hide (safe zones have also been removed), so if you’re being chased by a horde of cops, get ready for... nothing. Got caught? Who cares! No one’s going to arrest you or throw you in jail, and your car won’t be confiscated either. Apparently, that’s what police chases look like in Criterion’s imagination.

They also went overboard with the graphical effects. The sun shines so brightly that you can’t see anything at all. Fountains of spray and dust from opponents’ wheels completely block your view. The dynamic day-night cycle changes so quickly you can’t make sense of anything. It was just morning, and now it’s already evening.

Now imagine what happens when all three factors coincide: an exhausting police chase, blinding sunlight, and a crash. That’s it, you’re done for. Or, at the very least, you’ve lost half the fun you were having before the crash.

The size of the game world is also unsatisfactory: you can memorize it in just a couple of days. What saves the situation is that the location design isn’t limited by curbs and railings, so you can drive almost anywhere you want. If it were at least twice as big, with long highways and freeways, the game alone would deserve a five out of five just for that.

Now, about the races. There are quite a lot of them, and they’re all very well executed. The main downside is how short they are. Three, maybe five minutes at most, and you’re at the finish line. The boss races should have been made into multi-stage events. The end of a long competitive stage is much more satisfying than a quick win over another “street racer.”

The only salvation for a player without multiplayer is just cruising around the city and enjoying the driving. In this, Most Wanted (2012) most closely resembles its street racing roots.

There’s absolutely no storyline in the game, and all the developers’ creativity went into making flashy cutscenes before the Most Wanted races. Seriously, couldn’t they have just repeated the story from the original NFS: Most Wanted? That would’ve been much more interesting, instead of everything coming down to just races and events. And without models, Need For Speed doesn’t feel like a premium game.

Multiplayer mode is fun. With 12 people raising hell all over the game world, it all turns into pure chaos. The list of modes available in free online play will appeal even to the most demanding players. Among them you’ll find sprints, circuit races, arcade-style “jump the highest” challenges, and so on. It goes like this: you finish a race, head to the next event, bumping and knocking out other players along the way, gather at the starting point, and begin a new competition.

Multiplayer can really hook you in, especially since real players are much trickier than AI opponents. On the other hand, as soon as you get tired of bashing into other players (and sometimes the game feels more like a boxing ring than a race), you’ll want something more relaxed. Unfortunately, you won’t find any calm races here, even though that should have been an option—not everyone enjoys DiRT: Showdown-style gameplay.

To the delight of many players, the updated Chameleon Engine delivers a decent, modern-looking image. And everything would be perfect if the developers hadn’t gone overboard with the effects and optimized the game for PC. Long load times, sudden FPS drops, lags even on powerful computers... but don’t worry, you’ll just end up turning all the settings down to minimum yourself, just so that damn headlight blinds you a little less.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012) launched with a couple of very unpleasant flaws, which you may have read about earlier. Criterion needs to fix them in upcoming updates, and then the game will truly shine. It’s quite possible that you won’t like the game at first. To really get its essence, you need to complete the game and also spend some time in multiplayer. Only then will you understand whether Most Wanted (2012) is right for you or not.