1.7.2013

I don't know what the developers of this game were smoking when they decided on certain aspects to it but whatever it was sure wasn't helping them.This game is very fun to play. I have been at it probably 10 or more hours now. It is one of the first games I've played in years that I've actually wanted to fully complete the game to 100% simply because it is so much fun. The controls of this game are sublime. Your cars feel heavy and hunker down on the road when at high speed. Get twitchy under breaking and are easy to spin if you are not careful. The game is designed around the idea of drifting. You can easily drift in this game by planting your foot into the accelerator and then tapping the break while turning.This steps the back out and you can drift/powerslide around most corners. The process is easy once you get the hang of it but is a little bit of a pain at first.The map on this game is pretty awesome. I was scared that the map would be a piddly little village of a city, where you have seen everything there is to see in an hour. Well you will probably have seen most of it in two hours but it isn't half bad. It is varied and has plenty of buildings which consist mainly of parking garages and warehouses but drifting up a spiral ramp and then driving full speed off of the roof through a billboard is great fun.Speaking of billboards, there are a number of challenges in this game that can be completed as you go along. The main one is finding all of the jackspots for cars. Then you have the billboard challenge which is similar to the insane jumps challenge from GTA except they put boards on them for you to destroy. The idea was that you go around your city and make these jumps and log your jump distance. Then on your friends list if someone beats your jump, their gamer picture will appear on your board. The challenge is to keep beating your friends jump distance. But if you play solo the idea is to find all of the jumps and successfully land the jump. There are also a number of security gates, the idea is simple, find them all and drive through them, you get some wanted score when you do. All of these coupled with completing all races for each car leads on to give your 100% completion rating. Best of all though it adds a much needed variety to the gameplay.This game is plagued with issues though unfortunately. The reason I've given this game a five start is because these issues are niggly at best, some aren't but some are and none of them really detach this game from the fun of playing it overall and that is what matters in a game overall in my opinion.The first things I will say about this game is it is mental. The idea of racing for money and then buying a car and adding parts to it are over. You don't race for money, you race for a wanted score. The score increases based on taking out fellow racers and police cars, breaking through police blocks etc etc. The idea is you race until you have enough points to warrant a race with a rival. There are ten of them in total, and each requires a subsequent number of points which you get by winning races. But the strangeness comes in when finding cars because that is exactly what you do, you just find them. These cars are supposedly yours but there are about 120 different spots all over the map with these cars just sat there. And you simply drive up, press triangle to get in and drive off.When starting a race you get these little cut scenes but they are so lunatic it is hard to understand what the point of them is. You are starting a circuit race and the cut scene before it is, a bunch of cars flying through the air, then your car comes in Back to the Future Part II style, lands on the road and the race starts. In another type of race where you have to outrun police in a set time has a cut scene where your car is driving along and police cars start falling out of the sky, then you are given control and you are off. Ludicrous.Now the graphics in this game are pretty awesome. Not PS3 quality by any stretch of the imagination (or not as it happens to be) but very good. A noticeable problem is head lights and shadows. Headlights and tail lights are terrible, just a mass of pixels in front of you. And shadows are so jagged around the edges I often wonder if I could do better myself. I doubt it, but they are that bad.The biggest problem with this game though is the resolution. For anyone who doesn't know what resolution is, it is the number of pixels that make up the image on the screen. If you have heard of resolution before you will have heard it in terms of TVs since 1920 x 1080, HD in other words which is a common thing these days. What that means is there are 1920 pixels on the longest dimension of the TV and 1080 on the shorter. Which on a very large TV is a good thing for quality. But if you try and cram that many pixels into a smaller screen what happens is you make everything really tiny. This is what is wrong with this game, it isn't 1080, it is less but being a five inch screen it becomes a problem very quickly. It means the text is very small. For someone with dodgy eye sight this will be a massive head ache. It also has the horrible effect of making distant obstacles like cars and walls (which you are supposed to avoid if driving) really hard to see, and going at 200mph in a supercar means they come up very quickly. Sometimes so quickly it is almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes it is bad enough on tight circuits that the only way to avoid them is to memorise where they are and hope you miss them. Couple this with the blurry headlights and driving on the wrong side of the road is damn right impossible.This game has been described as Burnout with the Need for Speed title. It is far from this. Burnout is an over the top, heavy impact game where a simply collision can turn into a full blown explosion mid race. It is very fun. This game isn't that, there is a collision system, where if you hit a wall flat out your car will do some flips and get beat up a bit and will stop. Then you will re-spawn and get right back into it. But the collision detection is bad, to the point where I would call it down right broken sometimes. You can hit barriers on the motorway at full speed and depending on what phase of the moon is out will depend on whether that constitutes a crash or not. Other times you can clip a barrier or simply hit a obstacle that isn't really there and total. You can hit a police car head on and just keep racing straight through them like they weren't there but do that to a pedestrian and you will total straight away. No consistency, and rage inducing when it happens a hundred yards from the finish line.Also this game has a very strange way of awarding your effort to pull of drifts or slipstreams. If you are going around a corner, even if the car ahead is pulling away and you pull a drift, on the same line they were going on, you will catch up to them. It almost looks like they are blatantly slowing down the car ahead to make the drift necessary. Same with slip streaming. Your speed largely stays the same when in someone's slip steam, yet after a couple of seconds slip steaming you will gain ground on the car ahead. Like somehow your presence behind them is putting resistance on them and slowing them down or something.But having said all of that, this game is strange, doesn't feel like particularly heavy amounts of attention went into its development sometimes but overall it is very very fun to play. It flatters you when you pull off a 400 yard drift missing cars and police stingers as you go along. It is well worth a play.

28.11.2012

Hello,I've just got the game and started playing last night. i'm about 20% through and believe i'm ranked at 8 on the most wanted list. This game if you haven't already heard has NO story to it as it's original game did. This is good in a way because you jump straight into the action. Also all the cars are available from the start, BUT you must find them. they aren't hard to spot, you are driving and see a car with for instance the BMW logo above it parked on the side, well you guessed it, it's a BMW you simply drive up to it and then it says you've unlocked the car. you can then press Triangle or Y to get into the car and drive from there.Or you can press right on the D pad and go to your garage and switch cars without changing screens!Each car has it's own set of races and through those races is where you upgrade your car. There is no money in the game but there are speed points or whatever they call them. You get these by near misses, oncoming traffic, jumps, air, takedowns, winning races, etc. The points accumulate to the mods on your car to upgrade them. For instance say you have sports tires equipped, well if you drive 5k miles you get the pro set (or something along those lines) So the game is very easy to progress. It's open world and you can drive everywhere.The cops are back in this one, but in my opinion they aren't as fun as the previous games. They are kind of annoying and when i first started to play i couldn't shake them! There is NO penalty for being busted, which is a good thing. One thing that is annoying about the game is that when you hit something it goes to the stupid crash video screen. That's not a bad thing in the game but when you hit a wall or a car or barely hit one, you see the screen which makes it very annoying very fast. I do like how you don't have to wait forever to get the cars you want. I do wish you could do more visual things to your cars. I would prefer that you could have a set color and not have to go to a "pay and spray" in GTA terms to fix your car all the time and change the color.The game is fun over all so far for me at least. I do not like the crash scenes so often, the cops could be a little more fun, and the visual upgrades like bodykits and rims could have been a little more in depth. But the game is fun, fast, easy to progress, apparently a huge variety of cars, i've unlocked around 20 or so this far. This game is a lot better than the shift game and undercover. As bad as those were i never gave The Run a try, although it seemed like it would have been better than the others. So over all i'm satisfied with this game and would recommend it. If anything at least you can pick the car you want and free roam and not worry about getting 3 strikes and an impounded car.I'm not big on multiplayer but evidently this game is all about some multiplayer and battling friends and beating their records and stuff. Best Need For Speed i've played in years. The lack of the story isn't so bad becuase they are usually corny anyway. The graphics looks great and so far it hasn't froze or lagged on me. hope this helps anyone trying to make a decision on the game.

8.12.2012

I am a huge fan of Need for Speed: Hot pursuit, so when The Run came out last year I was very excited, and ended up being very disappointed. So I had high hopes for this new Need for Speed: Most Wanted. After playing for a few months, there are a fews things that I feel could use improving. First off, wrecking out is so ridiculously easy, it is crazy. You can bump someone in traffic going 30 miles an hour and get "treated" to the stupid crash animation. Until you can build your cars up and upgrade the bodies, be prepared to crash. A LOT. Once you get your cars upgraded, you end up pushing the traffic (of which there is a TON) out of your way or crushing them. Single player mode can be fun,as previously mentioned there are multiple races for every car. But you can really lose yourself for hours just driving around and doing ludicrous jumps and breaking your friends speed records. Which brings me to the online play. Playing with a group of friends can be fun. You select a pre-set playlist or make your own from a mix of races, team races, stunts (jumps, parking tasks, drifting) and then you compete to see who can win the 5 events. What adds an extra dimension is you can take out the other players in the middle of an event like drifting, so they can not score anymore. Can be fun but also annoying. After a while it does get a bit repetitive though. What is really missing is any interaction with cops. In single player mode, they never leave you alone. In multi player, you never see one. That commercial they are running with a pack of cars being chased by the cops? Only in single player. Would be nice to have something in the multiplayer, it is called Most Wanted after all. In Burnout Paradise they also had a team mode where you tried to take each other out and a most wanted race where your friends tried to take you out. Those type of events would be cool. Overall, fun game, drives well, if a bit more difficult to control than Hot Pursuit, and something I feel will give me a good amount of enjoyment. We will have to see if any DLC becomes available to improve upon the game. After all the best part of Need for Speed:Hot Pursuit was the most wanted DLC they added after the fact. We still play that regularly after almost 2 years.Edit 12/9 One thing I forgot to mention is the checkpoint system. When you are doing a point a to point b race, there are checkpoints that pop up that you have to drive through. Miss one and you have to double back for it or you do not complete the race. The problem with this is that unlike in some other NFS Hot Pursuit games, you can't use shortcuts to cut down you time if it means bypassing a checkpoint. It is kinda of a rigid system which doesn't award you for learning the city. Also if you are playing multiplayer and you are stuck with some idiot who never stops yapping, you can't mute him like you could in Hot Pursuit.

11.11.2012

Like any recreation of anything, you're going to run into things that you don't like, or that are gonna piss you off. My biggest qualm is how you move up the blacklist, because you move up the list, even without having to race anyone, but if you want to get game completion and the blacklist cars, then you have to race them, and they have some really good cars. But other than that, this game is excellent. It has a more arcade feel much like the newest Hot Pursuit (also made by Criterion, also an EXCELLENT game), but the driving physics are a bit more realistic yet more fun at the same time, so that's a huge plus. The open world map, it may look small, but it's actually pretty good,

1.12.2012

If you liked Burnout Paradise, chances are you will like this game. If you liked Hot Pursuit, you will most likely like this game. If you come in expecting it to be like the "old" Most Wanted, then you need to do more research. There were plenty of reviews and interviews about this game that should have made it clear what it was.This game is basically about speed and having fun driving unrealistically. If you are looking for a sim or a game where you can mod the slope of the carbon fiber hood and test it in a wind tunnel, then you will be disappointed.Fantastic game, this is. It would have been worth the original 60 dollar price tag but I got it on Black Friday for 25 bones.UPDATE 12/3/12I've heard a lot of people complain about rubber band AI in this game.

16.4.2014

Criterion are to be commended for making this game at all. Everyone else was ditching the Vita left and right, but they stood up and declared that not only would Need for Speed come to Vita, it would be a complete port of the critically acclaimed 'Most Wanted' title. And complete it is! Every inch of map, every car, stunt, challenge, race, song and engine sound is here and correct. For a game coming to a weaker system from consoles reaching the end of their lifespan this is a damn near miracle.Gameplay is great, a big open world to zip around in, tons of cars to unlock, auto log and a lag free multiplayer mode (down to four racers only, but you'll barely notice).

20.6.2013

Very good game, a must have for any racing fan. I really like how they ported a complete version of the game from consoles. It's exactly the same apart from the graphics. I have few issues with it though:- The most annoying thing are the frame rate drops, they happen not to often but you can really feel the game slow down at some points causing you to crash (if driving at high speeds) which sometimes leads to loosing a race or to miss a turn etc. It almost feels like the game wasn't optimized for the console properly.- The graphics are not that amazing, they're good for a handheld console, you won't get anything better anywhere else but they're not as good as in other games.- Vita's low resolution screen really shows in this game.

13.11.2012

Good points, best racer on a handheld everlooks great, nearly as good a console but best a handheld has ever seen in racer.gameplay is greattaken down most wanted racing is intense and so much fun!, and mixing it with your own music in your vita and playing with head phones put's you in your own racer world!cant put it down! drifting, big jumps!police a i is good, they will try there best to catch youlevel is huge so many jumps, and drifting cars are fun.no lag in multiplayer starts very quick!in games sound is great, and music is goodcars dotted around, are great, you actually get excited to jump in a different ride!note.. controls on vita syicks, some people say its tricky to control and hard to see what is comming a head,

6.12.2012

I really enjoy this game. I have been a NFS fan since I got the first game on my 3D0. The franchise has gone through changes. There are more than one developers for the title and no 2 games are really alike.If you liked the Paradise City, you will enjoy the same feel this game has, from events, to the stunts. As a NFS fan, there is plenty to this game that reminds you, that you are indeed playing NFS. Most notable is the car modeling and the fact that all the cars have distinct handling differences. The open world, just take a car out for a cruise is one of my favorite features that all NFS should have had.The good: Car selection is top notch. Availability of the cars from the get go is nice.

8.12.2012

This Game is nothing like the previous version of Most Wanted YES.., to me it was kind of similar to Burnout Franchise but much more advanced and also nothing like it because of that., once you get the steering down it is also not so bad...That being said here is the KICKER and why i would rate this game 4 stars instead of 2 or 3!!!!The GAME unlocks a whole new world once you type that online code and launch the Multi-player mode online. TRUST ME!!!I was flabbergasted and found my self shifting my adrenaline along with the gears so to say.....This title is sooo much different online and makes it worth the money or its relase which many ppl seem to be disappointed with.

26.1.2013

Most of the other NFS games I played, had many problems. In Hot Pursuit, you can't turn without drifting, the shift series had no story, and the run was just crazy: starting at 100th place and you have to get to first. For a long time, Midnight Club L.A. had been my favorite racing game, not only because it had a decent story, but good car simulation, races, and just the fact that it was open world. This changed after I bought Most Wanted. Most wanted does not only have an amazing open world map with mountains, bridges, downtown, etc.., but it had amazing simulation for NFS. Every car I drove was comfortable with turning, racing, and unlike many other games, the cop chases were intense,

4.11.2012

This is a brilliant game. When I say dissapointment, I'm exagerating abit. The graphics (most of them(shadows and lights arn't that good)) are very good, it's quite close to the console. The gameplay the best part of it. The other cars, the police ( they can be a bit unresponsive but once they get started they're very good), and the traffic, in fact every part of it is much better than Asphalt. The map is so well set out that it's good for if you like the hot pursuit map or the burnout map.Sadly the reasons why I didn't give it 5 star was because it needs more features. Unlike Asphalt, this does not have adhoc, even though if your sitting next to a friend you can make up a few games (like racing from A to B)

4.3.2016

This is easily one of Electronic Arts' best games. It takes some getting used to the controls. You'll crash a lot when you first start out. However, once you get the hang of it, this is easily one of the best games in the series and an absolute must have for the PS3. I couldn't help but wonder if some elements of the game were borrowed from a similar game called "Burnout" (which is more about destruction than racing). Even so, for the casual auto race fan, this game has all of the best features of all the best Need For Speed games ever made. It's not just racing and eluding the cops (who are fun to get away from), but a plethora of other activities scattered throughout a massive free roam city called New Haven that will keep you playing for hours.

8.12.2012

Seriously i don't know why thers to many bad reviews about this game.STOP COMPARING the old NFS:MW(2005) with this one.I recomend to buy this game if:you like arcade type races.you are a fan of NFS: series.you think that NFS:HP was good (and it was).After a few days playing the game and understanding all the gameplay i just love it.Graphics:good, if you know NFS:Hot pursuit well, thers no big changes, but the game is more the "urban" kind so, you will see a more complex enviroment.Music:good, i rlly like the soundtrack; i don't know all of the groups who sing/play here, but i'll find them.History:kinda poor, ok... you will not find the bad guy who stole your car/girl and you will fight to find him; here all you got to do is drive,

26.11.2012

I used to own the old NFS MS back in the early PSP days and fell in love with the game.Unfortunately since then the NFS series has got worse in my eyes, not the game it used to be, especially on a portable device. It's fantastic to see what Criterion have done with this port, it's a fantastic example of what the VITA can actually do! The graphics are toned down from the PS3 version and the streets don't have many CPU cars floating around but these are the only negatives I can say. The game is fast with plentiful options to improve and mod your car. The graphics are still very good and the gameplay is pretty awesome. I've owned many games on the VITA and this is up there,

Need for Speed: Most Wanted a Criterion Game - Reviews

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