Like using jack spots, speeding through these repair shops reduces your heat level. Heavy SUVs might try to ram you head-on, and Corvette Interceptors speed along in front of you, deploying spike strips that, if hit, can seriously diminish your car's handling.Īll is not lost, however repair shops are all over the city, and driving through one instantly fixes up your car and gives you a fresh coat of paint to boot. As it increases, the police start setting up roadblocks in your path, and more and better law enforcement vehicles join the fray. At the lowest level, you might have a few cop cruisers on your tail. Your heat level determines just how much effort the police are putting into bringing you down. The upside of this is that if you get the cops on your tail as you're roaming about the city, you can pull up on a car's jack spot and, provided that you've got a bit of distance between you and your police pursuers, hop into the other car, reducing your heat level a bit. (This includes the five cars that were released as downloadable content called the Ultimate Speed Pack on other platforms.)Īlthough they can be accessed from anywhere in Fairhaven almost immediately, cars are still scattered across the city in set locations, called jack spots, in Most Wanted U. In this release, with the exception of the cars driven by the most wanted racers, you have access to every car in the game from the start. In earlier versions of the game, building up your car collection was a simple, unrewarding matter of driving up to cars parked all over the city of Fairhaven. Make up your own story about playing as someone who hates EA so much, he wants to smash all of their billboards. Winning events also gives you access to modifications for that vehicle, including chassis that make you more resistant to impacts, gears that increase your acceleration or top speed, and tires that reinflate if popped by spike strips. Victory in each of a vehicle's events nets you speed points, which you need to earn a set number of before you can challenge each of the most wanted racers. It's a tried-and-true arcade racing game mechanic, and Most Wanted's terrific sense of speed makes it as reliably exciting as ever.Įach vehicle has five events associated with it. You build up your nitrous bar by doing things like drifting, taking down cops and rivals, and driving in oncoming traffic, and you press a button to spend that nitrous. As in most Criterion racing games, boosting is a big part of racing in Most Wanted. Cars have a great sense of weight and momentum to them, while still being extremely responsive, and as you'd expect from a racer by developer Criterion, judicious use of the brakes and a bit of practice will have you blissfully drifting through corners at high speed. Despite the stable of real-world cars, the driving isn't realistic. Well, that and the fact that driving, racing, and eluding the police are really enjoyable, for the most part. It is merely a structural hoop to jump through you do it simply because the game tells you that this is what you are supposed to do.
The racers on your list are identified only by their cars-they don't have names or faces or personalities-and without a personal investment in defeating them, doing so isn't nearly as satisfying here as it was in the 2005 game. In the new Most Wanted, you still have the goal of defeating a number of street racers, but there's no narrative to back it up. Both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, but the earlier game contextualized its action with a hilariously over-the-top story about taking down a crew of illegal street racers.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted U takes its name and some of its concept from the 2005 game Need for Speed Most Wanted. The flying of sparks, the sound of metal on metal, and the sense of impact make trading paint with other cars feel great.
The features designed exclusively for Most Wanted U contribute little to the game, but Most Wanted is still an attractive and frequently exhilarating racer. Now, the game has come to the Wii U, complete with a U pointlessly stuck to the end of the title. Late last year, Need for Speed: Most Wanted served up a welcome second helping of Burnout Paradise-style open-world wreckin' and racin' shenanigans, though it replaced that game's imaginary automobiles with the real cars that are a constant of the Need for Speed series.