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> Results: Need for Speed: Most Wanted
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If you saw the movie The Fast and the Furious and wished you could play a videogame just like that film, Need for Speed: Most Wanted was made just for you. Well, it was sort of made just for you. While that film was all about driving imports really fast, it at least showed that it was dangerous to do so. This game throws out all the danger associated with wrecking a car and replaces it only with a slap on the wrist in the form of being arrested.
It still manages to be compelling for a good number of hours despite the indestructibility of your car. Most Wanted is about street racing. You show up in a fictional town that's the hub for all things fast and illegal. Quickly taken down by the local jerk, he wins your pink slip and rides your car to the top of "The Blacklist". While he's going to the top you've got to start at the bottom after being arrested and subsequently released because of lack of evidence. The goal is to beat everyone on the list and get your car back by winning that last race at the top. Things get more complicated as the game unfolds, but the action is as simple as it gets. This is both a racing and free-roaming game. While roaming, you can get the attention of the cops, go on a rampage through the city and as long as you get away, you'll rack up more heat and more Bounty. Do this enough and those Blacklist guys will want to race you. At the same time, you've got to enter various street racing events in order to make the money you need to upgrade your cars as well as buy your way out of prison if it comes to that.  Both the roaming and the racing are significant parts of the game given equal weight in your progression. Roaming gets a little dull, but just when you're sick of the area you're in, you should be moving on to a new section of town. It's an expansive bit of road that becomes available with no loading between areas. That makes every car chase super exciting as you can use all sorts of alleys, off-road shortcuts and the plain old highway to evade the police. The cops get madder and tougher the further you get too. It's not uncommon for a chase to last for ten minutes or more. The chases are always exciting and they get you thinking too, looking for the best route and for special objects that can be knocked down to stop the cops. When you're either sick of the roaming or you need the money, you have to take part in more standard racing. This includes point-to-point races, knockout rounds, pure speed tests where you have to go as fast as possible through speed traps and even drag races of a sort. The game provides plenty of variety but not a ton of challenge. Many races are winnable on the first try as long as you're careful. Running into traffic is your biggest worry as well as knowing some of the trickier parts of the city streets. Racing is entertaining, but it does get old after awhile. In fact, that's the biggest problem with the game overall. There's not much more to it than constant entry into races and another cop evasion. The acting in the cutscenes as well as the voice acting in the cell phone calls you receive is ok, but the plot is not. The EA Trax include some good songs, but like most games, there simply aren't enough of them. It's hard to keep on slogging through all the races and getting into yet another car chase when they play out so similar each time. It's hard to know what they could've done to take away the deja vu that permeates the game after a few hours of play, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing once you've seen a lot of the town. Changing your car doesn't really add anything to the overall excitement either since none of them drive realistically and you can plow through signs, traffic, trees and even some small structures with no damage to anything, ever. At least it's all pretty to look at. Even on the PlayStation 2, this is a game that looks superb and runs at a pretty good clip even if the car modeling leaves a little to be desired. There are some neat graphical effects that help improve the sense of speed. Also, the designers were smart enough to make the signage functional at the same time they were plopping in all the advertisements for things like Burger King, Axe cologne and more. Yup, this game is definitely one of the first to really support product placement with in game signage. It's right alongside the highway signs for exit ramps that help you evade the cops.  Most Wanted is the first game in awhile to replicate some of the things that made the original so great. Point to point racing through a realistic setting with the cops bearing down on you is what Need for Speed is all about. That you can do it in a free-roaming setting here actually makes that even better. The urban outlaw theme is wearing thin, though. Tuner culture has pervaded the last three games in the series and fast cars are about more than putting aftermarket bodywork on a Lexus. This is a good game, but it seems stuck in a rut. 
With a little bit of discussion with your kids about the illegality of street racing, this game is perfectly suitable to kids ten and up. It can even skew a little lower if you choose. It's important to remind your kids that the whole concept of the game is illegal: that is street racing and running from the police. The simplicity of the gameplay appeals to just about anyone and in fact the ten to sixteen set are probably the ones most suited to the see-through plot and the game's setting.
The difficulty is such that anyone can handle it, too. Things start out easy and really only ever get hard because of the multiple goals you need to complete in one pursuit session. There's only so much you can do with racing games before you're out of ideas. More disconcerting is that there is clearly catch-up AI at work in the races. You can get far enough ahead that it won't magically catch-up but instead it slows down for you to get ahead making things too easy at times. People don't like to lose, though, so this probably isn't an issue for most. Talk about how this is all fantasy and then it's easy to let your kids ten and up have a good time running from the cops. Maybe they'll even get caught and find out that the police take a lot of money from you when you mess up and they might even take your car too! It's a good lesson for kids to learn. Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "Need For Speed" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Need for Speed: Most Wanted |
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