It achieves this by clubbing cars with their own unique races, and the only way to upgrade them is by beating these challenges. While most such open world racing games limit your car choices due to paucity of cash and the tendency to stick to your expensive upgraded ride, Most Wanted gets around this tendency in a rather clever fashion. You need these points because they unlock the most wanted racers, beating whom forms the spine of the main missions. These can be earned by winning races, completing challenges, racking up near misses and through takedowns.
Instead of introducing its own currency, the game incorporates an experience system dubbed Speed Points. Most Wanted deliberately fosters exploration of the city over haggling with menus and cash management. Some are hidden in plain sight, whereas the more exotic ones are harder to find. The idea is to find all 41 of them and then they are yours. The game itself has no currency that can be used to buy and upgrade cars. Unfortunately, navigation forces you to squint at a mini map at the bottom of the screen, but this stops being a problem once you familiarise yourself with the city.Ĭriterion's push towards a seamless racing experience is evident from how the entire city is accessible right from scratch. Criterion draws inspiration from Burnout: Paradise in the way how the races have a fixed start and end markers, but the choice of the route is left upon you. In fact, there is no starting grid at all, as all races have a rolling start. You will neither find any rivals talking smack in the cutscenes, nor will the streets have sexy girls flagging you off at the starting grid. However, Criterion has deftly done away with the underground race culture for an unadulterated racing experience. It's an open world romp through a fictional setting dubbed Fairhaven as you challenge ten of the city's most wanted racers to claim the top spot. The general setup has been carried forward nearly unchanged from the original.
What you end up with is a vehicle handling scheme that's accessible to the lowest common denominator, while also providing a challenge to those willing to put an effort towards learning how to use nitrous boost and drift in a smart manner. Once you come to terms with that fact, it is apparent how the reboot smartly cherry picks elements from the twitchy arcade controls of Burnout and a relatively complicated physics model. That surprisingly isn't a bad precedent because this game is meant to be played with a gamepad. In fact, Most Wanted has, beyond doubt, the worst implementation of the Logitech Driving Force GT wheel I have witnessed in a contemporary game. Try to hook up a steering wheel and the game scoffs at you. The cockpit mode is conspicuous by its absence, but the ideal way to savour the game is in the third-person view, with a bumper cam thrown in for good measure. True to its arcade roots, you get a limited number of camera angles. What would a Most Wanted be without the cops?
The ten crore question is: does it succeed in striking a fine balance between staying true to the franchise and bringing something new to the table? In a word, yes. Fortunately, the Burnout maker went about it the smart way by keeping the core mechanics unchanged, but instead chose to improve upon and fine tune existing gameplay. Toying with new gimmicks clearly is a risky proposition in this case. Criterion therefore has huge shoes to fill with its Most Wanted reboot. It had nailed down the cops and robbers gameplay of the NFS: Hot Pursuit in an open world setting akin to that of Underground 2. Released almost seven years back, the original Need for Speed: Most Wanted was one of the best in the series. Over the years, nearly every possible permutation and combination of open world settings, vehicle combat, bombastic set pieces, destructible environments, illegal street racing culture and Japanese drifting craziness has been done to death in this jaded arcade sub-genre. These games, you see, do not have the luxury of banking on gameplay alone. However, just like burgers need a lot of ketchup, arcade racers' lack of technical depth calls for gimmicks to make the experience more palatable. Simulations work well on their own, much like the expensive pickled eggs that the rich swear by. If racing sims are the caviar of the genre, arcade racers are more like burgers.
The fundamental difference between the sub-genres within racing games is best explained with a culinary metaphor.