Need for Speed: Most Wanted (Burnout Paradise Appreciation Thread)

[Nappi]

I just shut down Koenigsegg Agera R and I am now officially the Most Wanted racer in the city, but I don't feel like a winner.

In paper the game sounds fantastic: An open world racing game developed by Criterion under Need for Speed brand. So basically Burnout Paradise with licensed cars and more police chases, right? Unfortunately, this game turned out to be the wasted opportunity of the year.

The first addition, licensed cars, is a welcome one, even if it means that the crashes are a bit less spectacular as compared to those of Burnout Paradise. The police actively pursuing you for speeding and general recklessness, on the other hand, is a design disaster. It is relatively easy to escape the cops if you start boosting like hell the moment they start chasing you. However, If you fail to do that, the situation will get very bad very quick. The more you struggle, the more "heat" you will get, which in turn means that more cops will join the party. The police can pursue most super cars with ease, and after a certain point trying to lose the cops and to avoid their sight for the cooldown period simply isn't worth the effort. Fortunately, there is no penalty for getting busted except that you are teleported back to the "jackspot". Still, the addition of cops to the free-roaming portion of the game effectively eliminated my desire to explore the city at all.

Criterion also implemented multiple systems that make experimenting with different vehicles as little fun as possible. First, while you can change parts of your car on the fly, changing the car takes you back to the spot you have found it. So if you want to try that huge jump with that super light car, you must be willing to drive several kilometers to get back there. Second, you have to earn each upgrade, including the ability to use nitrous, for each car separately. This cycle got a pretty tiresome after a while and I settled with a couple of maxed out cars. Finally, all cars, except for the ten most wanted cars you have to win, are available from the beginning. I obliterated 7 of the "bosses" with my Lamborghini Gallardo which I discovered 15 minutes into the game, and found it hard to get interested in the lesser super cars. Some of the races meant for the smaller, less powerful cars were interesting, but as all the boss cars were super fast, there was little incentive to improve those lesser cars. All in all, I only used less than 1/4th of the cars.

(I should probably have mentioned that there are 5 races for each car. After you have gotten all the upgrades your only options are to replay those races or one of the most wanted events.)

As for the technical things. The load times are horrible and restarting a race can take forever. This is particularly annoying during events where you have to maintain certain average speed, because recovering from crashes is much harder in those cases and restarting the race is often the only option if you want to succeed. The game looks beautiful on PC, but the frame rate is horrible (or horribly inconsistent) no matter what settings you use. I had to force 30 fps mode from the config file to be able to play the game at all. Criterion is at least aware of this issue, so hopefully the situation will improve at some point.

The soundtrack was horrible and I was seriously considering replacing it with that of Driver: San Francisco, but in the end couldn't be arsed.

It's not all bad, though. Most of the races are actually pretty fun if a bit repetitive. The devolopers also got many little things right. The park benches and flower pots, for example, are not immovable objects like in so many other racing games. Intros of the normal races range from pointless to quite interesting. Those of the most wanted races, however, can be

. I've heard that the multiplayer is simply genius but haven't tried it myself. The autolog stuff seems interesting, but I have no friends in Origin so I can only compete with myself.

This game is not horrible by any means but it could easily have been so much better and that makes me incredibly sad. Oh well, maybe I should buy Burnout Paradise on PC now that it is dirt cheap.

Has anyone else played this game? Was your experience different? Is the multiplayer worth getting into? Man, how good was Burnout Paradise?

[Orv]

The multiplayer is the only reason to play this game. It's like the "do some crazy shit cooperatively/competitively" mode of MP Burnout Paradise taken to a ridiculous level. Try it!