Without a typical garage, the emphasis is entirely on you to discover new vehicles. The unobtrusive menus of Easydrive helps keep the action prescient, unless you decide to fumble with settings midway around a particularly merciless corner.īut Most Wanted is not always that simple, and its core structure may confuse thanks to Criterion’s scrapping of standard car classes and the genre’s usual event-based career progression. You can also switch and jump straight to cars, swap upgrades and head into multiplayer. Discovered events can be accessed immediately, whereas the game will plot a course if you’re yet to take part in it – the right balance between immediacy and discovery, if you ask me. Like Burnout Paradise, Easydrive is mapped to your D-pad to allow quick, easy navigation of standard menus. Exploring every area of this dense, spectacular world warms you with a satisfying way to spend time, from the discovery of luxurious cars dotted across every corner of the map to the constant stream of information about nearby races and your online rivals.Īs well as the return of Criterion’s social platform Autolog, Most Wanted’s jazzed up GPS – dubbed Easydrive – knits the game together with its player. This is absolutely essential for a game of this type: Criterion’s desire for thrilling freedom would be nothing if its host was a bore. More than just a network of roads for you to plaster with burning hot rubber, Fairhaven holds Most Wanted together with a tight embrace. Even better, it doesn’t require you to give a toss about Top Gear in order to love it.įairhaven, the diverse metropolis that acts as your racing playground, is a construction of weaves and webs starting from its bustling industrial core and spiralling outwards into wide-open mountain tunnels and stretches of highway.
The result is one of the smartest, most enjoyable racing games of 2012 – one that slams emphasis directly on the race itself.
In fact, despite the class that Most Wanted’s stunning garage exudes, Criterion has made a clear distinction between the materialistic superfluousness of games like Forza Motorsport, where the focus is very much on your love for cars and the desire to curate a digital garage, and the thrill of the race itself. There’s none of that “turning car lovers into gamers” stuff here. Like the cold metal girders and sun-glinted glass panels that make up Fairhaven’s skyscrapers, Need for Speed: Most Wanted is as mercilessly rock solid as it is stylish.
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