Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Winning these race challenges gives you some much needed prize money, which can be used to buy a new car, new performance parts or visual upgrades. These were completely pointless on the PC version. How do they fair on the 360 though?

To challenge a blacklist rival, a set number of Milestones and Bounty’s also need to be also completed in addition to races. Milestones are tasks you have to do which involve the police in some way or another. For instance, you might have to complete three milestones to fulfil the requirements of a blacklist racer. One milestone may require you to get into a cop chase involving 13 cars, and then get away from the pursuit. Another milestone might ask you to rack up 400,000 bounty points and then evade the cops. Defeating a blacklist racer allows you to pick and select two panels from six or so random ones. Behind each panel is a random reward, which could consist of:

There are various police hotspots in Rockport and on occasions, you will bump into the cops while cruising around or whilst in the middle of a race. It does not matter how slow you are driving, they will chase you down for no apparent reason! However, the addition of the police is what makes Most Wanted so exciting and enjoyable, for a while anyway. Chases normally begin with one or two low-level police cars chasing after you, and you can hear them over the radio relaying your position to the other police units in the area so they can try to intercept you. This chases can be quite frantic and there are no rules - ram them off the road, make them crash into other drivers, just do anything to cause sheer mayhem. After a while, other units will join in on the chase and before you know it, you’ll look in your rear view mirror and see 10+ cars giving chase, this is enough to get your adrenaline flowing.

These chases do get significantly more difficult because while you are fending off these cops, your ‘Heat’ level is rising. There is a heat indicator on-screen, which surrounds the mini map. This shows your heat level from one to five. The longer you keep a chase going, the bigger your Bounty will be and the higher your Heat will rise. At heat level 5, the cops are so hard that they end up coming at you with SUV’s, SUV roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters and supercharged police corvettes. At heat level 1-2,  you will encounter standard slow faring squad cars. The heat level feature is much akin to the multiple wanted star meter that the Grand Theft Auto series has.

Fending off the army of police on your tail is easier said than done on higher heat levels. On the lower levels, you can just get away with hitting the nitrous button and holding on as you blast off into the distance, because the cops have no real way of catching up. On higher levels however, it takes some seriously good driving skills to fend them off, because as with almost every EA game - the AI cheats like hell. Can EA ever get AI perfect? I doubt it.

To get away from the cops, you need to get right out of visual range and literally hide. You will then see a small Evade meter appear on-screen, and then once that runs down you will get the blue cooldown meter. Once the latter expires, you can then relax as the cops have given up on you. Another way of losing the cops would be to utilise the environment around you, to an extent anyway. Dotted about Rockport are various bits of destructable scenery and objects that you can smash into to deter the cops from chasing you. There are Petrol Stations, which explode if you drive right through the pumps, street scaffolding which collapse all over the road, and water towers to name just a few.