NEED FOR SPEED: Feel the need to be 'Most Wanted'.
Written: Nov 24 '05 (Updated May 23 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Graphics, "plot", gameplay, embedded videos, controls, excellent police A.I., multiplayer via LAN & Internet
Cons: System requirements, no damage model, some popular car models missing,
The Bottom Line: Maybe the best NFS yet, but also the most demanding on your hardware.
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| theuerkorn's Full Review: Need for Speed Most Wanted Black Edition for PC |
Electronic Arts has a habit to trump their last release of the Need For Speed franchise with an even more polished version the next time around. Just as sure is that the name is not recognizable as the latest version, and Most Wanted is no different. Either way, this year we're sort of leaving the "fast and furious" Underground and return to the more serious streets where the direct confrontation with the law is the only way to build your reputation. As for the game, bad is good and the badder you are the higher your ranking (or the better you are). Ready. Set. Go!
IN A NUTSHELL
In the wake of special editions for all the recent top game releases like F.E.A.R., Quake 4, and Call of Duty 2; "Black Edition" stands for additional content on the extra DVD, but realistically I have seen no other version of Need for Speed Most Wanted to make sense of the name (other than puffery). The "extra" DVD contains mostly video showcasing certain features of the game (i.e. cars) and the typical "the making of".
Anyway Need for Speed Most Wanted is a true successor of the original series and daytime racing along with stunning graphics and the mandatory police chase are signatures on your way to be most wanted. You start out with a fairly decent ride which you loose due to foul play and then your new found friend Mia helps you to get even with Razor (the top villain) but hooking you up with a ride and opportunities to race and work your way up. You need to qualify for each black list opponent by winning smaller races, and in the end you take the tricked-out car from the beaten black list rank. You also earn cash which you can spend on upgrades (tuning parts) to make you ride more competitive.
Overall there is not so much that's revolutionary, but graphics, gameplay and controls are the most polished ever. (Maybe even across the genre.)
MAIN FEATURES
Graphics: It's easy to say this is the best looking Need for Speed ever, though you might see that slightly different if either your computer is not fast enough or you prefer the all-night scenery from Underground 2. Anyway, vegetation looks great (fall trees) and the surrounding is as always very detailed. New is dreamy effect, that is similar to FarCry's rendering mode called Paradise. It adds glow to bright edges and improve even low-resolution displays that way. Particle effects (smoke, fog) are used with caution but very effectively. HDR is the new hit and Most Wanted simulates the brightness when you have to squint in cases like coming out of a tunnel (into bright sunlight). I guess we have to thank the quantum leap gaming consoles recently took with the XBox 360 to have game developers present games to the PC that use modern hardware.
Rating: *****
Sound: Back to the roots, Most Wanted sports a very suitable mix of rock and rap to keep you company while you're blasting through the city. Sound quality of both music and special effects is great, though collisions typically have the same effect as the marginal damage model -- they are not very adaptive to the "crash". Further, the game doesn't make much use of positionial (3D) audio.
Rating: ****-
Controls: Grab a gamepad and rule the streets. Driving is relatively intuitive and often forgiving. Well, it's not a pure race simulation and the brutal reality of those (in expert mode) would be not fitting for the Need for Speed series anyway. Overall the steering is very approachable, and a nice balance between realism and arcade. It's easy to learn, but takes some time to master -- especially later in the game. The drag racing is the only mode that stands out in the steering since you only initiate to switch lanes and it takes some time to get used to the fact that you can't pass on the walkway -- causing numerous crashes when trying without success.
Rating: ****-
Physics: Need for Speed never claimed to be a driving simulation, and Most Wanted is not breaking with that tradition either. Fun is the objective, and that requires for the laws of nature to be bent a little. Nevertheless, this version feels to me like the best balance between an arcade racer and a driving simulation. Driving characteristics are not meant to be real and so it happens that a Fiat Punto burns just as much rubber as a Lamborgini on take-off. The skid pad would crumble in shame seeing street cars perform as they do in NFS.
A welcome change from the matchbox car collisions in both 'Underground' games is that you don't come to a sudden and complete stop should you even just scratch a corner or sometimes light pole etc.. Most Wanted blows through poles and even trees, and the only effect is often that you slow down slightly. Damage modeling is still virtually not existent for the cars themselves and a shattered glass texture is about as much as you get when plowing straight into a wall. Alright it's not real, but did I mention it's fun?
Rating: ****-
Gameplay: Though not an official successor of the Underground series, many elements are still very similar (I guess the Need for Speed franchise is to "blame" here.) You can still freely roam through the city and find and event, which is unlocked depending on your current track record. The same is true for the cars as you have to earn the money and reputation to acquire a tougher ride. Free roaming can be cumbersome at times, since you have to find races and drive there through the city. Fortunately NFS Most Wanted allows to directly jump to an event and takes the negative part out of the free roaming. You'll engage in the typical Circuit, Drag, Knockout and Sprint races. In speedtrap race the outcome is determined by the sum of all speedtraps which you have to blow through as fast as you can. Tollbooth is a variation of the knockout where instead of opponents you have to beat decreasing time to get to the next tollbooth. Some races have no police involvement while others turn into a wild chase where you still have to win while evading the police.
Rating: ****-
Cars: So we're back to the typical Need for Speed supercars and here is another hint that Most Wanted is not a continuation of Underground. You won't find too many licensed stock cars, but the ones chosen by EA (or sponsored by the respective car company) are a good mix of pure fun. America's muscle pony is of course not missing and BMW got a huge promotional spot in the game. Of course the new Mercedes SLR is not missing either. All cars you and I drive to work everyday. ;-) Alright, so your car is not in it (my S2000 is neither), but let's escape reality and not repeat.
Handling of each car is great and well balanced with your opponents. Acceleration is the most dramatic difference between the virtual Fiat Punto and the Lamborgini Gallardo, but your race opponents are balanced well, so you won't find yourself fending off a supercar in an economy model.
Rating: ****-
Tracks: Beautiful! What Underground 2 did for night time racing, Most Wanted now takes into daylight. Amazing trees and towns are almost too beautiful to simply race through them. Streets include soft shoulders and the typical shortcuts (which sometimes require to break through a fence etc.). The shortcuts are marked on the map and not as hidden as in Underground 2. The layout is both gorgeous and challenging (sharp bends and hidden turns). Not only is that a graphical feast it's also catering to the driving enthusiast in me. (I just wish I could take my car on one of those tracks.) Traffic is well balanced and mostly reflects a slow pace, just enough to provide moving obstacles which sometimes make sudden moves. That is not to say that slow vehicles coming around the corner are easy to avoid at 300 km/h.
Rating: *****
A.I.: Singleplayer can be tough, but for Need for Speed veterans the first few blacklist events should not require more than 1 repeat to claim rank 10. Nevertheless, the computer knows the city better and puts up a good fight. That would be racing buddies and police as well. With enough nitrogen and a long stretched road the cops are relatively easy to shake off at first, but get more inventive (i.e. road blocks) as your reputation grows. By the time you're driving for 5th rank on the black list computer racers are good but with the right equipment still "easy" to defeat. Some milestones, however, involve an insane amount of road blocks and helicopters and police SUVs that are aggressively trying to immobilize you. With that it's increasingly harder to evade a pursuit. Once racing for second or third, the police chases become a true challenge and sometimes frustrating (to race 10 - 20 minutes and then being caught by police due to a mistake). Oddly enough, it's just as hard to get the chase going to such an elevated state since the first one or two cops often loose sight quickly and need to be chased down. ;-)
Rating: ****-
Progress: As seen in pretty much all racing games, progress is saved at the end of the race only and that's by design as it's very hard to walk off mid race and the resume some time later. Most Wanted is no different and does a good job in allowing to discard races or repeat them in the case that the computer pals actually beat you. You can restart in the mid of a race, and lost races have no effect on your rank or cash. Police chases, however, require that you evade them first before kumping to a safe spot, or else you might end up busted (which typically cost a small amount of money to get out of but also all the milestones during the chase are lost.
Rating: ****-
Multiplayer: If you want to race against real life people, Most Wanted supports online play and LAN. The latter is best if you can round up friends to participate in a local network. Online is a little more difficult as you have to find a worthy server. Unless you found a good one, be prepared for a potentially long trial and error period to find the proper game (regarding skills and server speed). Once there it's most fun to race against people you know, but since racing is not scripted anyway, it's fun to engage in a quick race or two without having to fear veteran punks that "kill" you upon arrival -- as seen in many shooters. So even if you loose, you still can drive like you mean it.
Rating: ****-
HARDWARE OBSERVATIONS
I first ran Most Wanted on my x800Pro and the result was everything but breath-taking. I mean it pretty but even with most options turned off or minimum, it was more like a fast slide show rather than smooth racing. EA suggested typical fixes like updating drivers but nothing helped. In the end I got saved by my most recent upgrade (Radeon x1800 XL), though not immediately as the choppy replay persisted until I re-installed Most Wanted all together. (Not sure if different graphics routines were installed due to the new shader 3.0 support of the x1800.)
Case: Termaltake Tsunami VA3400SNA
Monitor: Viewsonic VP201s
Motherboard: ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe
Processor: AMD Athlon64 X2 4200
Memory: Kingston HyperX DDR400 (C2), 2 GByte
Graphics card: ATI Radeon x1800 XL
Hard drive: Western Digital Raptor 74G SATA 10k
Operating System: WindowsXP Home SP2
Video Driver: Catalyst 5.11
Chipset Driver: nVidia nForce v6.70
Resolution: 1600x1200
Given the high resolution, Most Wanted runs smooth with almost everything set to maximum, except Anti-Aliasing and Car reflection detail. However, the next day it somewhat returned to the choppy behavior for what reason ever. CPU activity reveals 60% - 80% use with relatively even distribution between both cores. Given that the culprit was most likely neither CPU speed nor available memory, Most Wanted turned out to be the second most demanding game on a GPU that's released in October / November 2005. Hence, you should check your hardware very closely before "investing" $50. Download the demo to make sure you can handle it. (Don't assume the final product will run smoother.)
TECHNICAl SUPPORT
Support is provided online via the typical CS chat-room style tracking system. Inquiring about my performance problem with the x800Pro (and essentially the x1800XL), I contacted EA in the attempt to either raise the issue or find a solution. Neither has been accomplished despite a total of 23 exchanges. I must have gotten a run-around in the whole department as always somebody else continued the discussion ...
EA Tech Jessica U.: Run dxdiag.exe and kill background tasks
EA Tech Jonas M.: Install latest AthlonX64 driver (1.2.2.)
EA Tech Victor: "We're happy to know that we've been of service to you."*
EA Tech Vincent A.: Install latest nForce 1/2/3 driver^
EA Tech Paolo R.: Limit Most Wanted to one CPU (taskmanager)
Box Mark A.: "send us an email if the issue persist after you've updated"*
Alex I.: reinstall WindowsXP due to processor upgrade
Landon F.: "The higher the resolution the more raw power it takes"
Francesco B.: "let us know if you need additional assistance"*
* ... nice try, but we're not done yet
^ ... dangerous advice on a nForce4 board
Eight different support techs and never the same? Looks like everybody took a shot at what it could be. Needless to say, nobody provided me with a solution. In the end I settled for 1280x1040 resolution as Most Wanted is apparently extremely demanding on even the latest graphics board. (SLI or Crossfire mandatory?) EA never acknowledged the fact that other games like DOOM III etc. do just fine in the high resolution and therefor it may have to do with Most Wanted graphics routines?
I gave the dual core tip from Paolo another try, and it appears that this time the improvement was noticeable and indeed may have been one of the culprits for the bad performance (not the video card). I am not sure if it's a sum of fixes I tried, but in the end limiting NFS to one core seems to have a major part in the solution. Patch please!
In the end, it turns out that none of the feedback was right and the Adaptive AA of the ATI card -- despite its intent to improve performance -- was the major player in the problems. Turning this feature off, allowed to select AA in the game and performance was still smoother ever at maximum settings.
SUMMARY
Need for Speed Most Wanted is an exciting racing game in the true spirit of the series -- with amazing graphics and a great balance between arcade and some simulation. Sound is catchy and the races intense (especially once cops get on your back). Controls flawless and overall feel excellent.
The title of the series pretty much turned into a prophecy relating also to the required hardware to play this polished graphics marvel. Racing is pure fun on the right hardware, and plain frustrating without the "horse power".
Electronics Arts confused us long enough with different version titles (and numbers) and seemingly unrelated gameplay. Nevertheless, the recent incarnation of this classic is packed with the best of the traditional NFS and the latest departure to the Underground. Real video avatars are amazing for computer games, but also have a low budged movie feel to them. I could do just fine without them.
Simulation fans should look at ToCa Racedriver 3 (coming up in February 2006), which sports better (more serious) driving physics and an amazing damage model along with an extreme variety of cars (and trucks). For everybody else, Need for Speed Most Wanted is an excellent past time for the holidays.
© 2005, Thomas Theuerkorn
UPDATE(s)
[6-Dec-2005] - EA released patch v1.3 which solves mostly LAN and internet play issues as well as cosmetics, but doesn't address multicore problems as seen with AMD's X2 processor. The list of fixes ...
- Fixed problem with user not being returned to the offline main menu when losing their connection.
- Users are no longer returned to the offline main menu after a LAN race.
- Fixed host hanging in an empty game room after exiting a race.
- Users are now able to find LAN races created through Quick Race.
- Fixed issue where the game will softlock and lose focus when clicking on 'Continue' in the [create new account] screen when information is entered but not confirmed in one of the first four fields.
- Corrected number of laps in Knockout race event in Blacklist 15.
- Fixed problem where users are disconnected from LAN after finishing a race.
- Fixed issue with backround disappearing when mouse clicking the 'Statistics' button during the Hurry Up timer.
- Fixed a crash in the Foreign Registration Alert screen if the user clicks the back button.
- Fixed a crash when backing out and re-entering the Rap Sheet using the mouse.
- Clicking the back button during the Rap Sheet intro now returns the user to the Main Menu.
- Fixed issue with the interior of the car sometimes disappearing during gameplay.
- Fixed performance parts not showing up unless profile loaded.
ONLINE RESOURCES
- Game Demo (single player)
http://www.3dgamers.com/games/needforspeed9/downloads/
- Community Site
http://www.nfsplanet.com/index2.php?lang=eng
Need For Speed: Underground 2 ****-
Need For Speed: Underground ****-
Midnight Club 2 ****-
Call of Duty *****
Call of Duty 2 ****-
Half-Life 2 *****
Pariah ***--
Far Cry ****-
DOOM III ****-
Thief: Deadly Shadows *****
F.E.A.R. *****
Quake 4 ****-
Painkiller ****-
Unreal Tournament 2004 ****-
Recommended:
Yes
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