Product Description:
To be Most Wanted, you’ll need to outrun the cops, outdrive your friends, and outsmart your rivals. With a relentless police force gunning to take you down, you’ll need to make split second decisions. Use the open world to your advantage to find hiding spots, hit jumps and earn new vehicles to keep you one step ahead.
In true Criterion Games fashion, your friends are at the heart of your experience. In an open world with no menus or lobbies, you’ll be able to instantly challenge your friends and prove your driving skill in a variety of seamless multiplayer events. Your rivals will do everything they can to stop you from getting to the top. In this world, there can only be one Most Wanted.
Product Details:
- Beat Your Friends - Autolog 2 ratchets up the intense competition with personalized race recommendations and feeds broadcasting all of your most newsworthy scores, speeds and times to your friends. Earn Need for Speed points at all times on any system as you try to outdrive your friends and become the Most Wanted.
- Non-Stop Multiplayer - Pick a car, hook up with friends and jump into a non-stop playlist of tight, competitive events. No lobby screens means the action never stops. Score big, rank up and earn endless rewards and upgrades. Keep the fierce rivalries going between events with endless opportunities to race, battle and explore in a huge open world.
- Open World Action - Lose the cops - your way. Hit jumps and shortcuts, lay low, or shake the cops in surroundings that play to your car's unique strengths. Freedom is everything. Drive anywhere with your friends, discover hidden gameplay or utilize your knowledge of the city to beat them in a never-ending supply of challenges.
- Racing Without Rules - It?s survival of the fastest as "Need for Speed Most Wanted" fuses the franchise?s, authentic "real car" feel with the intense speed and aggression of Burnout. Power down, slide out, and battle your way past cops and rivals using pure driving skill, and heavy doses of nitrous.
Customer Reviews:
I really wanted to like it... By Jayce Kibler
I really wanted to like this game...probably one of the games I have been looking forward to the most. I have played every need for speed game in the franchise. Like others have already said, this isn't just a remake of the old most wanted. Yes, there are cops that chase you, and you do kind of get to customize your cars. The real problem with this game is the most important aspect of any racing game, and that is the control of the cars. This game is AWFUL with the control. The best way I can explain it is when you try to steer left or right, there's like a lag or something. It's just really not responsive. I am using a 360 controller.
Also, I've seen other reviews on here saying that the frame rates are terrible. Let me clear this up. Yes, I have noticed some frame rate drops, but not terrible ones. I haven't done actual testing, but I would guess going from a constant 50-60fps, and the drops go down to maybe 30 at the lowest. Someone else said the graphics look old. This is also untrue. This game LOOKS fantastic! I am running an AMD Phenom II x4 3.4ghz cpu, 8gb of ram, and a Sapphire Radeon 7950 graphics card.
I also read some other reviews that said the game sucks. Again, I disagree. I think they have done everything in a nice, new, refreshing style. Let it be known, I loved the Hot Pursuit game by them, and also The Run. Really, the only thing holding me back from this game receiving a 5 star rating is the poor handling of the cars, and just a little bit discouraged by the frame drop. Not a huge thing, and I am serious about when games have frame rate drops. It's really not that bad.
Oh, on a side note, I was thinking maybe the car was handling like crap at first because I was at the beginning of the game and it was just that car. Turns out to not be true...I have like five or six cars now and you just can't help but to constantly smash into either other cars, walls, or every freaking light pole on the side of the street.I don't quite understand why NFS still exists By D. Wilkes Jr.
I grew up with the NFS franchise. The games were always great. The series peaked 3 times equally: Porsche Unleashed because of its attention to historical detail and physics, Underground 2 for taking all that was good about Underground and then adding an open-world environment, and then Most Wanted for taking what UG2 did, and simply removing the boring bits and enhancing the best ones. After Most Wanted, things started to slide. Carbon was okay, but then the series went off a cliff. Undercover had the worst environment detail ever with even less plot, Hot Pursuit simply was not made for people who have ever driven a car in real life (keep in mind all NFS games were great BECAUSE they were arcadey, but predictable and had linear handling), The Run wasn't even finished, and then we get this, Most Wanted 2, for all intents and purposes. Without question, this is the most disappointing game of the entire franchise. Why? It's not the worst in full, but since it meant to update the original and is absolutely terrible, it loses even more points. Let's get started:
Graphics
Quite outstanding, actually. The port is just fair, but the game is actually nice to look at. Not up there with Hot Pursuit, but still nice. Doesn't matter though as the remainder of this review will show you.
Handling
There is none. Cars do not behave like cars, they all behave exactly the same which is something like a cross between a yacht and driving on an ice rink. Accelerating is fine. Braking is fine. Turning? You turn by hitting the handbrake and going into a preposterous slide. This would be fine if it was like Burnout, but there is no correlation between how much you slide and how fast you were going. If you try to brake normally and turn, the car reverts to boat mode. This game makes Cruisin' USA look like a simulator. I can put this another way: it is as though the handling model simply was not finished, but they wanted to get this game out for what...the on-Halloween season?
Gameplay
Gone are the days of racing for cash to buy cars and upgrades. Instead, you, with zero back story, start in an Aston Martin and are told to simply drive up to a Porsche, press a button, and then you can drive it. Yes, you find cars scattered throughout the city, but you aren't rewarded for your task. No. Instead, you just can swap cars on the spot as though you already own them all. Speaking of which, you can even do this when being chased by the police. Have 8 cruisers on you? No problem, hop out of your 911 and get into a Shelby Mustang and you'll hear on the radio "Suspect has changed vehicles, now in pursuit of grey Ford Mustang!". Keep in mind these cars are literally on the side of the road or in the middle of fields. Those familiar with NFS games will understand that the problem known as rubber-banding is worse than ever. Doesn't matter if your Gallardo is going 180mph, the basic police cruiser will still pass you as though you're standing still. The only thing more inane than this is that you can have a full head-on crash into a wall, get a message on the screen saying "CRASHED!"......and then continue your chase, but if you slow down normally, you'll get busted. This isn't like the rewind feature in The Run, it just happens. I could go on, but there's no point.
Plot
The entire game is run from a HUD saying you have x amount of points until you get to challenge the Most Wanted racer in x position. Woo hoo. So no, there is no plot, you come out of nowhere in an Aston Martin Vantage, and immediately "steal" a Porsche 911 and just hop off and start racing. I am not exaggerating, that is your first 45 seconds of gameplay.
If you have owned any NFS games in the past, let me just put it like this: this isn't one. It's a terribly made game which happens to have good looking models of cars in it. Once again, graphics have taken the front seat and actual fun fell off the top of the roof as you did a burnout to start a race (yes that is how you start races). Look elsewhere.Great game, Poor PC port By Austin
The game is poorly optimized for PCs. Frame rate drops happen whenver you turn the camera. Im on a 2700k and gtx 680. I put the graphics on low and it still drops and hiccups and hitches. wait till the release a proper update or drivers.
Besides that I love this game. Its burnout paradise 2. As long as your cool with that, you'll enjoy this game. People expecting the original Most Wanted should just go play the 2006 game.
::UPDATE::
Four days after launch and the performance has gotten better on low settings. The most severe drops occur when inside buildings with some shadows on. Also, the higher your graphic settings, the worse the drops are. Them more chaotic your chase and multiplayer the more the game suffers. This game does not run smoothly on high settings in demanding areas. period.
high settings in multiplayer simply is not smooth.
my gut tells me its the lighting models that are killing the frame rate. but I cant back that up.
This can be considered nit-picky by some, but I'll be the first to tell you the lack of optimization does not take away from this game, its still very fun to play and I've been enjoying it since launch!
::Update 2::
40 hours into this game and I'm still loving it. The multiplayer and autolog have been keeping me busy. Unfortunately the performance issues are still there, I've been trying different settings and have found a setup that runs fairly well. Although slow downs online can't really be avoided. Ive made note of a few problem areas in Fairhaven where frames seem to dip no matter what setting I have on.
There are quite a few discussions going on out there about MWs performance and I by no means am the only one experiencing less than stellar performance.
Criterion recently said a patch is in the works.
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