Criterion doesn’t make sequels to other people’s games. They’re quite emphatic about that. Hot Pursuit wasn’t a follow-up to any other Need for Speed, but rather Criterion’s personal take on the theme. Need for Speed: Most Wanted shares its name with another game in this genre-spanning racing brand, but the interpretation is all Criterion’s own. It does feel a bit like a sequel, though, in some ways – not to any of EA’s previous NFS games, but to the developer’s 2008 open-world racer Burnout Paradise.
Most Wanted is an open-world racer too, setting the player down in a shiny, good-looking American-style city with luxuriously wide roads, extremely car-friendly urban architecture and absolutely no cyclicsts to get in the way. You can leap over the freeway, drive up stairs, drift crazily around the end of a pier, antagonise the police and (naturally) take part in street races of every imaginable variety. And here’s the best part: every car in the game is open from the start, hidden somewhere in the city. All you have to do is get out there and find them.
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No more staring longingly at greyed-out shiny Ferraris in unlock menus. No more accumulating XP or cash or whatever other arbitrary value for 10 or 30 or 35 hours before you’re allowed to drive the cars that everybody actually wants to drive. There’s just you, the cops, and a secret-packed urban playground designed for absurd driving. And, via an updated and improved version of Autolog, the constant presence of all your friends.
Like Hot Pursuit, Most Wanted is a social racing game, making every tiny challenge into a social leaderboard. Autolog is everywhere, populating the city of Fairhaven with competitive gameplay and turning every speed camera and visible billboard into a competition. Fly through the air for the longest time after smashing through a billboard, and your face will appear on it, adorning that same billboard in your friends’ game until one of them beats your record. The game’s hook, really, is the desire to become the most notorious driver amongst your own group of players.
The city of Fairhaven is full of distractions and incentives, security-gated alleyways and secreted cars and underground shortcuts, all designed to make you want to explore its 100-odd miles of road. Open-world racers can often feel directionless, leaving you to tool around in a city without giving you all that much to actually do – Burnout Paradise suffered from this problem – but here Autolog provides you with a constantly-updated list of new score challenges and people to beat, in addition to the races and events that Criterion constructs for you.
“The city has to be inviting and it has to be interesting, and at any point in the game you’re parked up and going zero miles an hour, there should be something interesting to look at,” says creative director Craig Sullivan, whom you might recognise from Most Wanted’s E3 appearance. “A jump in the distance, a ledge you think you can drive onto, a billboard somewhere high up that makes you think ‘How do I get up there?’, or an interesting drift corner, or some back allyways that have security gates up and make you think, if I smash through them what’s down that alleyway? Is it a car? Is it a hidden route that lets me go faster during a race?”
When Need For Speed: Most Wanted’s emergent gameplay isn’t throwing up anything that grabs your interest, the Easy Drive menu is where the single-player races and challenges are hiding. Lifted straight from Burnout Paradise, it’s a real-time d-pad operated menu that you can use to switch between different cars, find events and tinker with your car’s mods without leaving the driving seat (although it’s a bit difficult to read and operate a menu at the same time as driving at 100mph down a freeway without smashing into other traffic). You can jump around the map straight to specific races from the menu, so you don’t have to drive around looking for events unless you want to. There are bespoke races and challenges for each individual car, and completing them unlocks mods (nitrous, different tyres that make life easier in off-road races, all sorts), giving you an incentive to stick with each car for a while rather than switching between them every five minutes.
This being Criterion, of course, the cars aren’t treated with po-faced reverence. They’re there to be crashed, shunted and generally abused. “These are the best-looking cars Need for Speed has ever had. That’s just a fact,” says producer Matt Webster. “But it’s in our nature to take something beautiful and want to smash it up.” This is best exemplified by Most Wanted’s totally chaotic multiplayer, which drops you and a big group of other racers into the city and just throws races at you, sending you careening all over the map to meet-up points.
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Before the races even start, there’s a melee at these meet-ups, with everyone ramming into everyone else and screeching around the vicinity. A familiar slow-motion takedown cam rewards you for nudging opponents into pillars or oncoming traffic. Most of the time you don’t even know when the race is going to start, or what direction you should be facing in when it does, resulting in absolute carnage when the 3,2,1 countdown appears on the screen. So far we’ve played drift and jump distance challenges as well as straight races, the latter of which resulted in an awesome mid-air crash.
If Forza is car-worship, Burnout is crashing and Hot Pursuit is cops and robbers, Most Wanted is chaos. It’s about doing the most outrageous things possible in a city designed for vehicular mayhem, motivated by social competition as much as the game’s own challenges. It feels like open-world Burnout that Paradise could have been, with extra structure and motivation provided by Autolog and a smarter, more fluid and intuitive single-player system. Play that uproarious multiplayer for more than five minutes, and you can’t wait to see more. Most Wanted takes many of Criterion’s best ideas and runs with them, and if it works it will play like a career best-of.
