![]() Matching the city’s stunning aesthetic are the equally impressive cars, which capture their real world relatives right down the individual wheel lug nuts. Cruising through sweeping mountain roads, passing over river-spanning bridges and ending up in the claustrophobic CBD never gets old, and the day/night cycle makes every area look different depending on the time of day. Criterion has crafted an open world environment that ranks alongside Sleeping Dogs and GTA IV in terms of complexity and detail. With most cars unlocked from the get-go and no storyline to usher you onwards, the most compelling reason to keep driving is to explore the city. ![]() While most of these events are enjoyable, the overall single-player package feels a little soulless. There’s even an Autolog recommends section in the Easydrive menu, showing you which events you need to play to show your pals a thing or two. Speedtraps similarly display all of your friends’ speeds, urging you to outdo their best. Soar through a billboard and your ugly Gamertag mug will be populated on all of your friends’ billboards, regardless of which platform they play. Extending the concept of Autolog first unveiled in Hot Pursuit, the city is dotted with speed traps and billboards. Police chases rear their head frequently, and vary wildly between being a high-speed hoot and a 15-minute bout of frustration, all depending on how willing the cops are to use their rubberbanding super powers. I enjoyed the straight up races the most hooning against a dozen other exotic beasts through every inch of Fairhaven’s glorious streets and tracks. In reality it feels closer to 75 though, as many of these events are shared between vehicles. Instead we’re given race intros that look as if they were created by Hunter S Thomson in an LSD factory, like this bizarre effort:Įach car comes with five events, giving a potential total of over 200 events. There’s no narrative either, drip feeding the player a sense of progression via cut-scenes. Race wins are instead rewarded with slightly less exciting mods like off-road tyres or bash-happy bodies. While this does allow newbies to jump straight into the more powerful rides, I found it also removed the urge to complete events. Just 10 of these cars are unlocked by events the driving seat of the other 32 will accept your warm buttocks instantly, provided you can find where they’re parked. Each and every vehicle here is as desirable as it is impressive, with the usual suspects such as the Lamborghini Countach parked alongside more interesting oddities like the Tesla Roadster. It’s a relatively small selection of cars in an overwhelmingly huge environment, but there’s none of the four-cylinder filler found in games like Forza. You’ve been given the keys to the city, along with the keys to 42 vehicles, with absolutely no restrictions on where you can drive. Underground tunnels, unfinished construction sights, railway lines and many other areas all change up the tone and feel of the driving, and half the fun is simply finding them. Your first few laps will reveal a city packed with towering skyscrapers surrounded by mountain roads, but further time behind the wheel reveals a myriad of nooks and crannies offering wildly different styles of driving. ![]() The star of the track this time around is the environment, the sprawling city of Fairhaven. Cops are still present, but they’re a minor speed bump rather than half of the driving experience. Hot Pursuit generated enough cash to buy out Ferrari’s entire supply of 458 Spiders, so it’s a little puzzling to see Criterion abandon the cops ‘n racers gameplay in its latest game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted. It might have taken multiple patches for the PC version to overcome the fact that it initially ran like a V6 with a couple of dead cylinders, but the fact that it still resides on my hard drive to this day is testimony to its quality. Despite EA’s best efforts to run the franchise on the smell of an oily rag, churning out annual iterations with the bare minimum of effort, Criterion’s knack for light-speed velocity, glorious graphics and addictive aggression injected the series with a blast of refreshing nitrous. Criterion Games singlehandedly saved the Need for Speed series back in 2010 with the release of one of this generation’s finest arcade racers, Hot Pursuit. ![]()
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