Need for Speed: Most Wanted Review

Going fast is really fun. Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) takes speed junkies on the ultimate joyride, dumping a box of Hot Wheels on an open world playground and letting the player take the wheel from there.

Developed by Criterion Games, this game has no fluff and no pointless missions. Just good tunes, fast cars, and lots of space to have fun.

Gameplay

After booting up, the game goes through a lightning fast tutorial set to the quintessential 2010s sound of Muse. Then, players are dropped into Fairhaven City, a sprawling urban metropolis.

From the jump, the player can drive anywhere on the map with no limits and no direction. Criterion puts you in the driver’s seat, demonstrating an immense confidence in their gameplay by making it the main attraction.

And boy, does that gameplay deliver. Half the fun of Most Wanted comes from simply driving around, breaking billboards and speed limits, dodging traffic, and outrunning the cops. Criterion took their experience from the open world racing classic Burnout: Paradise and infused it with Need for Speed style, crafting a world dense with opportunity for racing fun.

The developers designed every nook and cranny of Fairhaven City with the sole purpose of driving a car quickly through it. This means every jump, road, and shortcut leads into the next. You achieve a perfect state of flow navigating the twists and turns of the city, almost subconsciously chaining jumps and drifting around corners at 100 miles per hour.

This design focus makes it so that discovering new parts of the map won’t kill your speed as you learn the terrain. But once you start driving through familiar areas you can really push the limit, anticipating turns to get the perfect drift or breaking through construction sites for a shortcut.

No matter if you’re racing, outrunning the cops, or just taking a joyride, there’s never a dull moment in the world of Need for Speed: Most Wanted.