EA's long-running Need for Speed series took a trip underground a couple of years back when the developer refocused the game solely on illegal street racing. While the nighttime racing series was certainly successful, the lawless world was always missing one key factor: cops. This year's installment crawls back into the daylight. The actual racing hasn't changed too much, but the
ever-present police make this game a whole lot more interesting. The game's career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take
on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the
scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the
Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately
run into a punk named Razor, who's definitely the sort of dude that
lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. He's at the bottom of the list,
but a few races later, he's sabotaged your ride and has won it from
you in a race. Meanwhile, you're carted off to jail. Left with nothing
but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is
to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist,
which is now topped by Razor, who's using your old car to wipe out the
competition. The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes
you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story
segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer
-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early
segments is awful...awful good, that is. You'll scratch your head and wonder
if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs
or if they're just unintentionally funny. Either way, they're great
. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences,
and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you
a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, "Mia, I am a cop"?
Or is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? You'll have to
see the story through to find out where everyone's allegiances lie. Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can
challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements.
You'll have to win a set number of race events. And you'll have to reach a
set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police.
The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling
around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu,
too. Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually
start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars
giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets
tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of
just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, you'll
be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes.
A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the
cops or getting busted. Stopping your car--or having it stopped for you by
spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops--is how you'll get busted.
To actually get away, you'll need to get out of visual range...and stay there.
The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. You'll have
to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably
the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might
blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again.
It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand
Theft Auto's open city and Metal Gear Solid's stealth mechanic. All the while,
you'll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that you'll have to keep a
couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on
your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car
getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever
you get caught (if that's more your speed). There's also a lot of racing in Most Wanted's career mode--almost too
much, in fact. You'll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B
sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed
trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while
passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track.
The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesn't
really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like
crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds--then picked it
back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will
occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, it'll catch up very, very
quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you
that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers
magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only
seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is
much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldn't be a big
deal. But flipping the switch from "drive like crap" to "drive like a genius"
is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough
to keep you going, and of course, you'll be dying to find out what happens
next in the story |
