If you mention the NFS series to a millennial or even a Gen Z, they will launch into how that game shaped their childhood. I was not one of those lucky kids, due to no access to a PC or a laptop. Hence, recently, I got my hands on the 2012 Need For Speed: Most Wanted.
Two different games, two different developers (2005 was developed by EA Black Box, while the 2012 was developed in the house of Criterion Games), but the same name. While the 2005 version of the Most Wanted, is acclaimed as a cult classic of the gaming sphere, the 2012 version gets all sorts of hate thrown at it, or is just ignored. Is that justified?
Quick disclaimer: There will be some bias in the review, as I am a car enthusiast. Please do bear with me.
The 2012 Most Wanted is quite different from the 2005 classic, as the 2005 is story-based, with each character having their own backstory and their own cars. The 2012 Most Wanted was more about open-world exploration and multiplayer and online features. It was sad that I could not connect to the multiplayer. I never tried connecting, to be honest, as I only wanted to enjoy the single-player game.
The lovely introduction, I always enjoyed this.
So, this review is flawed, somewhat. Another big reason for a flawed review would have been that I have not played the 2005 version yet. But, I will only be talking about the 2012 version and does it deserve the hate it gets, according to my opinion. This a review of the 2012 game and not a comparison between the 2005 and the 2012 Most Wanted.
I am dividing the game into different sections I wanna discuss. The sections are gameplay, missions, soundtrack,graphics and NPCs.
So, let’s go.
Gameplay: The game is best played with a controller, so I had to invest in one. Plus, learn how to use it, as it had the Xbox configuration and I had only played WWE on the PS4. So, that took me like a day or two. It is quite easy to learn the controls, as there is no clutch mechanisms (unlike other racing games like Forza, iRacing or even Assetto Corsa). The movement was a bit janky-like in the beginning, but I would chalk that up on my skill, or lack thereof. But for game that is 12 years old, the gameplay was smooth. Bit unrealistic even. The driving experience made me attached to some cars quite a lot, or loathe a car so bad, that I finished it’s missions in a 20 minutes. The brakes, handbrakes and the throttle response were immediate. I was the brakes were a bit more faster that immediate, that would have helped me not crash into every other NPC/building/poles and trees present on the road.
A lot to unpack. So, let me start with the driving first
As I said, the driving was quite good. Revving the engine was a bit unrealistic, but for me, noise = good. So I did not care. Turning cars were, to my surprise, quite realistic. If it was a heavy car, it would feel like a yacht and would initiate the turn way later. The turning radius would also be a bit less. For example, the Aston Martin DB5, a car launched in 1964, felt heavy, had slow acceleration(when stock) and turned like how a elderly person would, which is quite slow. I had almost launched my controller at my wall, trying to race that old boy. But the Ariel Atom 500 V8, a relatively light car, turned while going 150+ km/h. Another thing which was a pain for me to do, was drift. I have clocked in 50 hours in the game, and it took me 48 hours to understand how drifting worked. It is quite complicated in real life, with footwork being the most difficult to master, and for that I give it an angry upvote. Throttle control, steering control and timing of initiating the drift played major roles in whether you turn into Michael Essa or end up wrecking your car on the nearest guardrail. Other that that, I really enjoyed racing or even cruising in the cars, especially with the radio off, so I could enjoy the symphony of the engine.
Modifications are an underdeveloped aspect of the gameplay, in my opinion. There are different mods for different parts of the body, but it is only limited to that. No engine mods, suspension mods or anything like that. Plus, the body mods which are mainly just chassis, body and tire mods, do not add anything physical to the car. I mean, for the chassis mods, I do understand. I mean, they at least could have added a roll cage for the lightweight chassis mod. I would have loved to see some sort of aero for the Aero Body modifications or bash-bars for the impact protection body mod. Developers really missed out on a plus point here. The first Forza Horizon game was also released in the same year, had an impressive level of customization and modifications for a car.
In order to get a car, you need to drive around the map and find something called “Jack spots”. It is basically a place, where a car is parked, windows down and the radio blasting, to get the attention of the player. Quite a good move, not incorporating any sort of currency to get a car. Instead, you get to cruise around in your favorite car, trying to find more of your favorite cars.
Another feature of the game is when you crash, you can repair the car, by driving through a, creatively named, Repair Shop. You can also change the color of your car here, by continuously driving and reversing through the shop. What a waste. The developers should have added customizations like that of Forza Horizon, as many players do not enjoy cruising around in a totaled car, trying to find a repair shop. The experience turns worse when said player crashes again (note: that player is me). I mean, the EA developers have done it in the 2005 MW, why did the Criterion Games developers choose to leave it out, is quite puzzling.
Heat levels were added to the game, just like the ones in Need For Speed: Heat (or so they say. I am yet to play the other NFS games). I do not have much to say here, as I have avoided the police and did not get a heat level more than 3. Just for that, I will talk about heat levels in missions and NPCs.
Driving one of my favorite cars, in a not-so favorite mission. Skill issue included as a bonus. (VOLUME WARNING)
There are some reasons, massive ones for me, as to why the gameplay kind of sucked. First, the crash/wreck mechanic. This mechanic has led to me almost flipping my whole table and causing havoc. Every time I touched an NPC car, my car would be totaled. While it was just a minor annoyance when I cruised around the map, it was a massive migraine when it came to racing. Since the races are illegal, there are NPC cars, moving around on the roads where you are racing. So most of the times, I could not react fast enough and end up annihilating an NPC and my lead. The cars do not turn as much in high speeds, and hand brakes make your car slide. While initiating a drift is somewhat effective, it was not on a straight line. I would have chalked it up to skill issues and late reaction times, but I have had crashes at relatively slow speeds.
I understand that such a mechanic is there to make the players sweat and have the game not feel like it is easy to beat. But, even the whole environment is considered as an object and have hitboxes. From a simple fire hydrant to a tree, everything is solid and will cause you to wreck your car. This is where I start hating the game, as the hitboxes in a corner of a building feels quite crude. I have crashed into those walls, even with the slightest of slightest touches. Opting for wide turns results in either me losing the lead due to the NPC racers being Senna and Schumacher themselves, or ending up in a NPC’s Celica.
Another feature which I don’t hate, but I find it useless, is the horn. I have used it a lot, and it did not yield any results. Makes me wonder, was it just added for realism?
RATING: 7/10
Missions: Unlike it’s older namesake, there is no story or story missions. There are missions allocated to each cars. But every mission followed the same theme. The names, location and cars of some of the missions were different, but they had the same theme. Cars of the same manufacturer, such as the Porsches, Aston Martins, and the Lamborghinis, for example, shared missions. This made sense.
Coming to the themes of the missions, they were:
1. Sprint Race: A race where you had to race other cars from Point A to Point B. The length, number of racers, location was on the basis of the difficulty, in my opinion. I am not sure about it. I love racing in sprint races and my favorite being “Around the World”, a 21 km long race, and you had race in a hyper-car. 2. Speed Runs: These were races without any racers, but a fixed length. The goal was to hit an average speed over that certain length. The average speed of these races were always in the triple digits and increased with difficulty or how powerful the car. For example, I need to hit 200+km/h in the Veyron SuperSport, but 172 km/h in the Ford F-150 SVT Raptor. Both had the medium grading in difficulty. 3. Cost to State: This was the mission where you had to achieve a score by breaking barriers scattered around a certain section of the map. There was also a time limit to this mission and you had to achieve that score in that given time limit. I hated this mission, as it is not racing, and is more about strategy. If I wanted to play a strategy game, I would have downloaded Clash of Clans. 4. Drift missions: Missions where you had to drift your car through gates specified in, you guessed it, a certain length of a road. During this race, there will be no NPC traffic or racers. There is also no time limit. This race was the most skill-inducing and I do have a love-hate relationship with this mission. Drifting a car weighing 1,888 kgs dry(4,612 lb. for the people under the Star-Spangled banner) 5. Circuit Races: These races had a circuit mapped out and the player has to race on that circuit for a given amount of laps. This felt the easiest theme out of all, as after a lap, you know what sort of racing lines are advantageous for you. The NPC traffic will try and mess you up, but with enough tries, you know how to avoid those too. 6. Ambush: The worst form of mission theme in the game. The goal of the game was to escape from the police at a given heat level. Heat levels are when you commit a crime, like accidentally hitting a police cruiser, getting caught going fast no matter on which side you are on, by a police cruiser, or during races (which are obviously illegal, both in-game and in real life. Be responsible, kids) or during ambush missions. The heat levels increase with time, and you get more attention on you as they increase. The minimum heat level is 1 and the maximum heat level is 6. When the heat level increases, escaping the cops become harder. I have no idea what cars these cops drive, but they can apparently keep up with the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the former record holder of the fastest production car during that time. Anyways, as the heat increases, you will face roadblocks and spike strips, alongside more cops chasing you. In order to have the mission playable and not have player get obliterated by a police cruiser, the given heat level which you have to escape is either 2 or 3. But sometimes, those even were quite hard, due to the SUVs, which are made out of titanium or adamantium, forming a roadblock. One touch, and your car is toast.
There were some side missions that you can do while cruising, such as the speed cameras and breaking Billboards.
Now, these themes were the only ones. So, after a time of playing, the game felt repetitive and progress felt quite slow. Every car had the same missions with the same themes. Like I said, cars of the same manufacturers, shared the same missions, just graded differently. You had to seriously love the franchise to 100% this game.
Coming to the grading of the missions, it was in three levels. Easy, medium and hard, obviously. This is where I gave up on the game. Even though there were three levels of grading, most medium races felt quite difficult, deserving of the hard grading. This might have been due to the reward systems, where the most sought after mods were thrown in the hard graded races. One example would be again the Aston Martin DB5’s second race. Without the lightweight chassis and the track tires, my acceleration was downright horrendous. I struggled to keep up with the racers and if I did not win the race, I would not get another important mod, which is the aero body.
There is a special sort of mission, which is the Blacklist mission. Just like the 2005 MW, you get to race 10 different cars. These are the blacklist cars, and you had to unlock them, before racing them. In order to race them, you had to earn a certain amount of Speed Points, and overtake their position on the list. You started from the bottom of the list. There were 14 cars and each of their difficulty increased in ascending order, starting from the easiest at the bottom, and the hardest at the top.
During these races, cops would chase you, as you would get a heat level, depending on the car you were going against. You had to dodge the cops, beat the racer, and then had wreck their car, to make it yours. Brutal.
While the Blacklist races brought about rain in a drought of missions, it felt quite grindy, as to get to the top, you had to earn a million in Speed Points. I was not a fan of that, at all. I never liked the monotonous grind in a game. Your game is supposed to be exciting, not a test of patience and/or endurance.
RATING: 6.5/10
Soundtrack: Ok, so for soundtrack, I wanted to focus more on the noises made by the car, and not the songs played on the radio. The engine noises are immaculate. I love how the engines sang their symphony whenever I pressed on the throttle, stationary or moving. I never got tired of the sounds and I always kept the radio off. I loved the audible gear changes as the car lurches forward. I also loved the little squeal during the gear changes and the engine noise going down an octave or something like that. You can also hear the revs going down smoothly, after you stop accelerating. The sound engineers did a fantastic job when it came to creating the sounds of the engine. I just wished they added the supercharger whine for supercharged cars and the turbo wastegate whistle (even though that damages the car, in real life). The only issue with the soundtracks and volume were that, even at the minimum level, i.e. 1, it would be so loud that I could not hear anything over that. The police sirens were the only thing that could drown out the engine.
Showing off the different sounds of the car. Watch the NPC in the truck.
Tire noises are fine, I did not have any issues with that. There would be different noises for different types of path. Such as, in a dirt path, you could hear the car skid a bit. In a gravel path, you would get that lovely crunchy noise. While drifting and burnouts, you can hear the tires screech and squeal, so this was genuinely lovely to hear.
RATING: 9/10
Graphics: For a game that is a more than a decade old, the graphics were pretty outstanding. A plus point, my laptop could run the game smoothly, at max graphics settings. The fps capped at around 90 fps with max settings, so I used that. I had no issues with 90 fps, as it still felt smooth. I was used to game at 45 to 50 fps. Anyways, the downside to max graphics is, the sun is no longer a sun, but a flashbang to your eyes, until you reach a course without any sunlight. I have gotten into so many crashes just because I was basically blind from the sun rays. Another point for graphics is that when your tires get caught by the spike strips, after they burst, you see the sparks flying around. Those sparks looked quite good, I enjoyed that little bit.
RATING: 8/10
NPCs: What is a game without Non-Playable characters, right? You can mess with them, with little to no consequences in other games, such as the GTA series, or if we talk about racing games, the Forza series. But no, not in 2012 MW. Hitting an NPC is equivalent to death. Your car gets totaled, and you now need to find the repair shop. If you are unlucky enough, the cops will also chase you. During races too, you need to by quite aversive of the NPC traffic. One wrong move and you are done. A crash, takedown and you lose all the advantage you had gained. Sometimes, it won’t even be your fault, but the NPC’s. Yet, you will be held responsible for that. Wow.
Another set of NPCs are the racers, which include the blacklist cars too. These NPCs are a bit special, not different. In a race, the NPC will either be slow or quite fast, depending on the grading of the race/mission. But they share one thing in common, that is, they will do whatever necessary to keep you from gaining. You will have NPC racers hitting your car at the worst time possible. The result of those hits, you either crash into someone or something, or you get spun around and lose all the momentum. Just like a souls game, these racers “learn” your tactics, at least that is what I felt. If I tried the same overtake I did on a previous try of the mission, they will instantly block me from doing that. Maybe because of this, I was hooked on doing every mission possible for each car, for 50 whole hours. Now, the most dangerous NPC group out there, the cops. These cops are ruthless, relentless and have such overpowered cars, that your Veyron and Venom GT will feel ordinary trying to run from them. These cops are not cops, they are homing missiles. Ready to destroy you, your race, your car and your mood, with just one well-placed T-bone. I have never, in all my hours of playing the game, not raged at cops. In Ambush missions, they will learn all your tactics you try for each tries of the mission. They will block the paths you tend to take the most, and you have drive around quite trickily, and speed is not your friend anymore, it is your enemy. But outside of the missions, the cops are quite easy to lose. Since, the heat level 1 is only deploys one or two cops to chase, losing them around a corner and hiding from their radars, is quite easy. But during missions and races, including blacklist races, no matter, where you go, how fast you go, you will see a flashing blue-red arrow following you and then annihilating you. Even after I have stopped, these cops will wreck my car, box me in and I get busted. Worst part is, you don’t lose any Speed Points due to being busted. So, I have no clue as to why cops are this cranked up in difficulty.
RATING: 5/10
OVERALL RATING: 7.5/10
If the developers added more features, more exciting customizations and not ignore the single-player so much, this game would have been a fantastic feather on the cap for the NFS series. But, the mission grading feel busted, cops are busted, the customizations have no physical appearance are some reasons, why the game could not keep up with it’s older namesake. I loved the open-world cruises, but then again, you become limited. So, if developers had added more features, refined the missions and their grading, the game would have been a hit.
But for me, I feel like this was the right step into the world of Need For Speed. I enjoyed the cars, the sounds they make and racing them. It was almost a dream come true. This game and this series is the sole reason as to why many of us today are car enthusiasts.
What game should I review? Leave a comment and subscribe!
Damn good review mah boi