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Friday, November 2, 2012

Need for Speed: Most Wanted - A Criterion Game (Limited Edition) review


It's not quite the smooth, finely tuned speed machine it could have been, but Need for Speed: Most Wanted is still an exciting racer.

The Good

  • Terrific handling makes driving a pleasure  
  • Police chases are usually intense and enjoyable  
  • Billboards make for satisfying asynchronous competition  
  • Online multiplayer races are fast and exciting  
  • Beautiful and varied city.

The Bad

  • In slower cars, police chases can be a frustrating ordeal  
  • Repetitive police chatter  
  • Lacks any sense of narrative motivation  
  • Building up a car collection is unfulfilling  
  • Inconsistent, sometimes dull online challenges.

Vehicles glide along invisible roads in the sky. Cars are borne out of twitchy, twisty clouds of darkness. Groups of police cruisers perform coordinated donuts, twirling about like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. In the creative and unusual pre-race sequences throughout Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you get the sense that the city of Fairhaven is a surreal land with dreamlike logic that might allow anything to happen at any moment. It's striking, then, that the actual game here is so typical and unsurprising, and that although it delivers plenty of the hard-hitting, white-knuckle racing Criterion is known for, it doesn't do so quite as well as some of the studio's earlier games.
By Carolyn Petit,

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