Need for Speed: Most Wanted

Visual upgrades are meaningless for the most part, although respraying your car, which has a high heat level, will fool the cops enough so they will not recognise you, although sometimes this can backfire on you.

Visuals/Audio

Most Wanted has a unique graphical style, and it is the first thing most gamers notice about this title, aside from the huge police chases. I have to admit that the PC version looks much sharper, but the 360 version beats it with its HDR visuals which do look stunning, especially at higher resolutions on a HDTV. Some cars look slightly elongated though on the car purchasing screen, but otherwise fine in-game.

The in-game engine tries to keep everything running at 30fps, but fails on random occasions, this simply isn’t acceptable for a console with this much power behind it, but remember that this is a launch title and early titles will suffer problems - especially when they’re EA ones. On occasions during fast, frantic chases, you will notice a definite frame rate decrease. This is why I still insist that all next gen racing games should run at 60 fps, hello thar Forza 2…

EA state that the game runs at 30fps because of the lighting and physics which cost a lot. While I could agree on the lighting being quite intensive, but physics? What physics? This is an NFS game and there aren’t any! At the end of the day, the main excuse for the random frame drop issues is that EA are working with new hardware. In its defence, however I should mention that I did not experience any slowdown during my gaming experience at all, but it is a major complaint from other reviews.

The only thing I did experience was a lovely flowing HDR engine running at 30fps reflecting almost everything off everything. Cars reflected sunlight, tree’s and surrounding objects, while shadows were realistic. I had no issues with the graphical side of the game, which I found quite impressive given this title’s age. The engine uses a great deal of motion blur effects when moving at high speed so most of the time you can’t notice any imperfections in building textures for example, and I’m sure there are quite a few.

On the audio side of things, Most Wanted shines. In my opinion, this is the best part of the entire game. The engine sounds are extremely good, especially the dip in revs as you drop down through the gears, and a burst of raw torque when you shift up. When you’re in the middle of a heated chase, your radio scanner will pick up the police band and you will hear them relaying positions to other units in the vicinity. This can be a great way of picking up the early signs of plans to initiate a roadblock, a spike strip trap, or even as to when the helicopter pilot decides it would be prudent to attempt to swoop down and ram you off the road. The cop chatter on the radio sounds very authentic and real. The EA Trax music is the usual mix of hip-hop and rock, I ended up switching these off right away.

Controls

The controls in Most Wanted really surprised me. Mainly because of the way gearshifts are done. I expected button presses for changing up and down a gear but instead nudging up or down on the controller’s right analogue stick shifts gears up and down respectively. I thought this was simply brilliant, and it made races enjoyable. LT and RT perform brake and accelerate functions, while LB is assigned to camera control. The left analogue stick obviously controls your steering with the four buttons assigned to look back, nitrous, handbrake and speedbreaker.

Suffice to say that the controls are very easy to get to grips with, and you will be up and running in no time at all as the cars feel quite similar to control with only slight handling differences between them.

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