Need for Speed Most Wanted
December 4,2005 - This year marks the tenth anniversary of EA’s Need For Speed franchise. In honor of that, Need For Speed: Most Wanted will be coming out in two editions. There will be a normal edition, and a Black Edition which will feature some more cars and a few new events. The previous two Need For Speed games; Need For Speed Underground and its sequel, have focused on illegal street racing and the tuner scene. All of the racing took place at night, and oddly, there was nary a police car to be seen. Most Wanted brings the police back in force, and the game benefits greatly from it.

Most Wanted is set in the fictitious city of Rockport and its environs. The story involves you, a no-name racer coming up from the Underground, looking to make a name for yourself. To do that in this neck of the woods, you’ll need to become notorious, and that means getting on the Blacklist. This is a list of the 15 most dangerous drivers in the city. You’ll begin the game with a cool tricked out BMW M3 GTR, and start trying to earn yourself some rep. The #15 racer on the Blacklist, a surly dude who goes by the name “Razor” is your first target. As you’re racing him, you learn that your car has been sabotaged and it will quickly fail on you. You lose the race, your girl, and your car. Oh, but things get worse, the cops arrive and you get busted. Some time goes by, and you’re helped out by a local racer named Mia. You’ll learn that Razor is now #1 on the Blacklist, and he used your BMW to get there. Now it’s up to you to get back on the blacklist, and move up the ranks before you can get another shot at Razor.

This all transpires through cutscenes that really have to be seen to be believed. It’s unclear whether or not EA was going for such a campy style, but that’s exactly what they achieved. The visual style is very reminiscent of what we saw years ago on the 3DO or Sega CD, and the acting, well, it fits. All of this combines to make cutscenes that are so bad, they involuntarily become great. It’s unfortunate that not too long after you begin the game, these cutscenes stop coming. The story is then told through voice and text messages from the game’s various characters, which don’t quite work as well of the CG/FMV cutscenes do.

The game’s Career mode is where most of your play time will likely be spent. You’ll start off with a small amount of money with which to buy a replacement car and begin your quest up the Blacklist. There are essentially two parts to the Career – races and chases. Each Blacklist rival will have a specific set of goals which you must complete in order to earn the right to challenge them directly. You’ll need to complete a set amount of race events, as well as earn enough bounty by shaking off the cops in the chase events. Once you’ve earned the right to challenge a Blacklist racer and win, you’ll have the chance to win their car by playing what effectively works out to a modern day shell game. Just pick the right icon and you may get the pink slip to their car. Once you’ve defeated a rival, you’ll cross them off the list and move on to the next one. The game falters a bit here; it doesn’t keep the difficulty curve steady. Though the cars will get faster, the AI driving them won’t get any better. In fact, the AI is incredibly dumb for the first half of the blacklist and then suddenly ramps up to an insane level. They’ll start to take every shortcut around, and very rarely will they ever mess up. The change is drastic and for a while will be frustrating, but the racing itself is good enough to keep you plugging away at it. Even if it’s just to see what happens next in the story.

Though the racer AI might become a bit of a nuisance toward the second half of the game, it’s the police chases that are the most enjoyable, hair-raising moments of Most Wanted. The cops will start off tame enough, driving regular old squad cars. As your bounty gets higher, so will the Heat level of your car. The higher your Heat level, the more aggressive the police will be in trying to stop you. They’ll use road blocks, spike strips, and other tactics to try to bring the chase to a close. The police aren’t the only ones who have a few tricks up their sleeves, either. You yourself will be able to use objects scattered throughout the environment to help you evade them. These Pursuit Breakers are usually pretty spectacular, like taking down a water tower with your car. They might not get every car on you to stop, but more often than not they’ll give you the few seconds you need to get yourself out of sight and end the pursuit.

Along with the Career mode are a few other peripheral modes. There’s a Challenge mode which has a series of events for you to attempt to complete, a quick race mode so you can just jump straight into the action, and a self-explanatory online mode. The online racing is quite solid. It allows you to play Circuit, Spring, or Drag races with 3 other players. Matches can be ranked or unranked. The biggest concern for online racing is finding opponents that have cars with similar attributes to keep the races fair. EA has a performance matching option which tries to keep the cars relatively even. The biggest strike against the game’s online mode is the lack of any type of chase themed races. A “Tag” mode where one player plays the racer and the other play as the cops might’ve been a nice addition. The online works well, but there isn’t really anything here that you haven’t seen before.

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