It's the pigs!
On the road there's always the potential to run foul of the law. When you do, the play freezes for a moment as the camera zooms in on the squad car ahead, and back onto your car. This can be a little disorientating, and seems to slow the pace. Thankfully you can deactivate these game camera shots. Once the Filth are on to you they'll attempt to take out you and any other racer, using PIT maneouvers and blocking your path. The longer you're pursued, the more heat you'll attract and more aggressive the police become. Hitting road-side objects, police and civilian cars and driving like a complete twat will earn you a bounty, and clock up infractions for specific indiscretions. The obvious reaction is to evade the police, but that would be too easy. Indeed, early in the game it is easy, when all you need to do it hit one or two
Roadblock
Pursuitbusters. These trigger cataclysmic events such as gas station explosions or collapse a radio mast, which if you're lucky will distract the police long enough for you to find a hiding place while things cool off. As you progress, this becomes more difficult, especially as your notoriety grows and the police are actively looking out for you. They also become more savvy, using three cars to box you in and bring you to a halt, or call up for static or rolling road block. The option to change to another of your cars (if you have any) means police interest will cool off on the garaged auto while you clock up more mayhem in your alternate ride.
The milestone objectives are short and usually fun, involving a set of rather anti-social activities; quickly evading pursuit by the police, ramming police cars a number of times, accumulating damage repair costs, clocking up bounty points by speeding, hitting cars, destroying road-side objects. Problems come later when more tricky tasks, such as running roadblocks, result in a lot of heat. Get caught and you have to pay off the fines or use special markers to bail you out, which happens more frequently in later, more daring, milestones. If you can't bail yourself out of trouble your car will be impounded and, if you're not great at these kinds of games, you're likely to find this happening quite often after just a few steps up the Blacklist, as the difficulty seems to step up significantly.
Subtle styling
Given the fanfare over the technical prowess of the Xbox360, the visuals are nothing shy of a disappointment. With no anti-aliasing to speak of, even high-def resolutions yield plenty of jaggies. There's also evidence of some shocking tearing and juddering frame rates, which aren't a very good advertisement for the HD Era of gaming. This being a multi-platform release, it's worth taking a moment to compare the game to the aged PS2. To be honest, there's not much in it. The PS2 version has heavy jaggies and a lower polygon count, but this hardly affects gameplay given the aforementioned problems on the 360. Aside from the Live function the game play doesn't differ significantly from the PS2 or GameCube. Of course the original Xbox version supported old school Live.
SPOnG score: C
Open road
For the Need for Speed veterans, Most Wanted has the exhilarating race and chase while maintaining the mod-em-up nature of Underground. It's an accomplished racer with great police pursuits, making it pretty solid fun if you can handle the steep rise in difficuly as you progress. For a next generation game it lacks the polish we've come to expect from even the first round of 360 games. Need for Speed:Most Wanted is unlikely to be the deciding factor in buying an Xbox 360 thanks to the minimal visual and gameplay distinctions from versions on what is now last generation hardware.
