Need For Speed: Most Wanted

This is part of an on-going bet with myself to write one thing about a video game per week.

I’m not a car guy, I don’t get off on car-porn. I don’t have car magazines sitting next to the toilet. However, I do enjoy an arcade racer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be kid-ified as Mario Kart, but I like racing, not adjusting sway bars. Need For Speed was at it’s best when it was focused on painting and customizing your cars. Underground 1 and 2 and Most Wanted had that, and I enjoyed tooling around in a Suburu Impreza with ground effects. 7 years went by, the Fast and Furious movies come and go and Criterion got to work on a Need for Speed game. It’s only okay, but why?

Modern games have a tiered progression system, it’s nothing new. When you start the game, you don’t have access to the top level cars. To get access to those cars, you need Speed Points (SP). You can find different cars around the city by driving around, but the really good cars are the Most Wanted cars. To get SP, you drive around the city smashing through billboards, passing cars, escaping from the police, winning races, and taking down those Most Wanted cars. When you first get a car, you can go through 5 to 6 races to get car mods (and SP) to make your car faster and more maneuverable. The problem is that every car you get starts off stock. The faster cars with stock parts can run down the slower cars with ease but you really need those parts. There are 10 Most Wanted cars and to continue moving up the ladder, you need to finish those races and get those parts. It’s repetitive but not as bad as the actual races. Also in single player, you can’t choose a paint color for your car. When you drive through a service station, it repairs your car and gives you a new paint color. Like I said before, one of the best parts of the NFS series was the customization of paint, spoilers, parts, and ground effects. They left all that out.

The races are a huge pain in the ass. The first race with a new car is so difficult that you can’t afford to crash. The AI cars know every turn and even better, they juke around traffic in ways you can’t. Also, if you do manage to get ahead, the rubber-banding is grossly apparent. To get access to a Most Wanted car, you need to beat them in a race. going from one point to another. If you beat the other car, you then have to crash it after the race. So that’s two races and the second race doesn’t have a set path. The Most Wanted cars have no problem driving the wrong way on the highway, dodging cars, and sprinting ahead. The thing that I love is when the cops enter the race, you crash, and a cop going well over 200 rubberbands into you, crashing you again, allowing the Most Wanted car to go so far ahead you have to restart. So, using the d-pad, you try to select restart race. While navigating the easydrive menu, which is in-game, another cop slams into you and crashes you. If crashing wasn’t a 5 second long shot of a car being slammed into by a cop car, that would be fine. It’s not.

So that’s the single player. The multiplayer would have to better, right? It’s a Criterion games, those guys made Burnout and the Burnout games have awesome multiplayer. There’s still that progression mechanic in place, but that’s not the bad part. When you enter a multiplayer game, the host picks a circuit of events. No matter where you start, all the players race to the same point. That’s the okay part because the amount of traffic is turned down and the other racers aren’t near you. Once all the players get to the event point, the event starts. If one of the other players times it just right, they can crash you at the start of the race. You don’t get a chance to do anything because some asshat decided to knock you out. If the event was one where you had to get the longest jump off a building, you don’t get to do it, straight up. If you were playing a CoD game, you’d still to keep playing, even if you were team-killed. Not here! So that’s one event that you got screwed out of, you still have 3 or 4. Right? Wrong! Because you don’t have a badass car, there’s a race you won’t win! And if there’s an event, some asshat kid will make sure you don’t get to participate. But all that pales in comparison to the true infuriating thing.

The other day I turned on the game to find there was a 2 gig update, which is a little weird. There are patches that are hundreds of megs, but gigs? Something seemed a bit weird. I waited and loaded into the city and hmm, a splash screen greeted me. It invited me to download one of three DLC packs. Weird, considering I had…wait a minute. Did I download those DLC packs already? I put it out my mind and started to drive around the city. There were new cars in places they weren’t before, and their map icons matched the DLC packs. Oh shit, did EA make me download those DLC packs and advertise to make me buy them by dangling these cute cars in the game? Yes! It’s hard to feel bad for a company when they pull stunts like this. I don’t mind pushing past a screen when I load up a game or see billboards in game, it’s kind of gross, but you expect it. But to be forced to download the DLC packs and have them dangled in front of your face is just cruel.

As a game, most of it isn’t that egregious but with multiplayer being a den of asshat children and being forced to drive past cars that you could own (dude, they even have different paint schemes than the regular cars), it’s a sad experience.