A title that far surpasses Hot Pursuit 2 - both in terms of speed, and sheer fun.
Most Wanted is a racer that is very influenced by the ghetto/gangsta stereotype. That means a lot of slang (By which I mean ‘foo’ and ‘yo’), a lot of ‘gangsta’ actions (one character insists on putting his fingers in an awkward position and waving his hand up and down as if the thing had just been run over), unrequired gangsta ladies (put there for the sole purpose of working up teenager’s hormones/making said teenagers feel uncomfortable when playing around family) and a slew of rap music. Dig it? I may hate you, but this game adores you. It’s thankfully not all ghetto, though - there’s the whole bit about running from the cops, too. This feature was ditched when the Need for Speed series went Underground (oddly enough those games are less gangsta than this outing…) but has been happily brought back here. However, this game still feels like Underground in the sun, with cops - not really a bad thing, but an unfortunate one for those waiting for the sequel to Hot Pursuit 2. It’s a good thing the game is simply extremely fun.
After you pop in the disk you get multiple options on the main menu to choose from - Career, Challenge Series, Quick Race, My Cars, Alais Manager and the inevitable Options. The main mode of the game is it’s Career mode, where you stroll into town and quickly become a street racer. As a street racer, you’re to get ‘accepted’ into town - in order to do so, you have this ‘Black List’ of 15 riders who are all guaranteed to be ten times more gangsta than you. It’s your duty to take out these whack fools and climb the ranks. Your nemesis in the story is a man so utterly gangsta that he calls himself ‘Razor’. Now I could have followed the intensely gangsta story, but I didn’t want to die of laughter, so I skipped all the chit chat between the characters. I’m sure the story’s just fine and dandy if you’re a 12 year old in baggy pants down to your knees who yells to random strangers ‘Yo, pimp my ride!’. If you’re not a lost soul, then feel secure knowing that it is, in fact, skippable.
Ridiculous story to the side, the game itself is a shining example of what a fun racer is. The game constantly crosses the boundary between realistic and unrealistic - you have all these neat mechanical parts to customize your ride if you’re a car tech guy and you have these totally whack body job thingies if you’re a gangsta. Then you have the racing at speeds you wish were this fast, the flying in slow motion over large gaps, the crashing into police car road blocks and watching the cop cars flip as you smash through. The game keeps an open mind for everyone, which is the stupidest idea in eternity and is the very reason why we’re flooded with waves of gangsta. If you can push against the current, though, then you’re set for a great time.
The career gives you the option to free roam the city - if you want to just cruise the roads exploring, or try and get as many cops on you as possible, you can do it whenever you want. Throughout the career you take various challenges in order to gain the respect for the black list member you’re to spit on next. You have sprints, drag races, circuits, several law-breaking inspired ones and even more still. Each challenge is unique - the sprints will give you one stretch of the city and simply ask you to get from Point A to Point B, like in Cruisin’ USA. The drag races give you an entirely new way of controlling the game and ask you to throw down your controller in furious rage as it’s needlessly complexity defeats the purpose of the somewhat arcadey racing. The circuits gives you a stretch of the city that loops and asks you to complete several laps around it. The law-breaking ones range from racking up the most damage you can do to passing various areas well above the speed limit. Each individual challenge is extremely fun (well, except the drag racing) and fresh on the first play through, but after a couple it becomes old and at certain points tiring. This is what you have to do throughout the whole game as well - it’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but the game could’ve used a few more of these challenges, and spread them further and fewer in between each other’s types.
Of course, you could also access all these challenges from a nifty menu - if you don’t want to explore the city and simply want to race/crash/destroy, then this is the quickest, easiest and most convenient way to do it. It also cuts the game’s length by a fair bit, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. The game itself is a fairly lengthily game for a racer - six or seven dedicated hours will clear the story. However, if you expect even shorter fixes, or you’re simply not at all interested in the gangsta story line and want to avoid it best as possible, then you can try the Challenge Series, which is basically just a collection of the previously mentioned challenges thrown together in typical ‘level’ format that most video games take, and the same one that Hot Pursuit 2 took. It’s quite a bit of fun, even if you already played through the career. Both modes are rather challenging - you won’t get everything down on your first try, and you will have to use brakes. The game’s unrealistic, but it doesn’t disregard realistic strategy entirely - you can get away with quite a bit, but come into a race without a proper tuning and you’re toast.
Tuning your car is, thankfully, easy. Any car newbie will be able to understand what works and what doesn’t thanks to a handy visual guide of sorts that shows what each part does to you car (for example, it may show that a certain part increases speed or handling). From there it simply becomes the task of trying to find money to buy all the various parts as well as trying to defeat the Black List members so that you can unlock even more parts. The system isn’t as robust or technically accurate as something like Gran Turismo 4, but it works well here considering the very nature of the game.
Cruising through the streets will offer up some pretty funky graphical effects - your car shines nicely in the sun and there’s some neat blur effects. However, while the finely and realistically detailed objects that surround you hold their own, they aren’t groundbreaking or noteworthy. The car models themselves have a fancy exterior and the effects work well like make-up, but closer inspection reveals models that could’ve been much better and more realistic than they are now. The game chooses to let your windows smash and have paint wear off when driving, but there are no more effects like this and neither of those effects actually last - choose a new challenge to do from that handy menu of yours and your car is as good as new. It’s nit-picking, but it would have added to the realism if you had to cover the repairs yourself and if the car actually got banged up more. It’s also a shame that the game is so gangsterly gangsta that 75% of the soundtrack is rap music. Yeah, they have Celldweller, and they have Disturbed. That’s acceptable, but the majority of the rap is not. It’s an opinion thing, though, so if you like rap, then you’ll love the soundtrack.
You can hear the cops talking about you as they chase you, and getting chased by the cops is easily the funnest part of the game. Most Wanted has, for the most part, put the Need for Speed franchise back on the ‘right’ track (the Underground games weren’t bad, but they certainly weren’t Need for Speed). It’ll offer enough cops to please the series fans and enough of Underground’s gaming mechanics have been left in for the new-found fans. The package is pretty complete, even going so far as to include a multiplayer mode (though, predictably, no online for Gamecube). Yes, the other versions seem to be a little better. Yes, you can make do with the Gamecube version, which still gets a lot right.