This game together with Underground 2 is our childhood classic. It is one of those games with which we grew up with. For me, it marks a step from childhood to teenage years with later Need for Speed games falling into grey blob which never attracted our interest. This is when Need for Speed games were THE racing games which everyone should play. So, I went back to the original to see how well it held up and if it is worth playing.
The quick answer, yes. It is still rock solid. Graphics had reached the point when they didn’t mattered anymore as much. Everything looks as it should. Gameplay itself is solid and holds up as a decent, basic racing game with unique for its time, time slow down mechanics. Together, you are treated to old school, nostalgic rock songs. Story starts strong and gets you going. Game is fun to play even today and runs great on modern systems.
The major issue with this game is that it doesn’t offer much variety. You don’t have much depth in how cars behave. You don’t have much depth in upgrading your cars. It is always mandatory “Upgrade Up” button which you press in the garage as next tier of performance gets unlocked. In addition, even customization of your car is kinda limited. The only truly bad part of this game are Drag races. It is a game mode where it takes away direct control of your car and you can only send commands to move left or right. In theory it should be all about gear shifting to gain the advantage. The problem is that gear shifting is bad and underveloped so there is nothing to it. However, it is nightmare to control your car. Those missions often love to place scripted cars as road blocks to dodge. However, if you press left or right, your car might fail to react all together. It’s very sluggish to shift directions, resulting in very frustrating control of a car. That is worse, even if you dodge the obstacle, terrible auto control can just slam into the terrain ending your race. I hated every moment of this awful game mode.
Game then drags on with its campaign. While it starts strong, you are quickly worn down by endless repetition of same missions. Each Blacklist driver demands a long list of races to be won and around 5 challenges against cops to be completed. It is tedious even if you are good at the game and win every race on your first try. God forbid if you are struggle in this game. Especially against cops it can become a loss spiral as financial loses against them are limitless, but your source of income seems to be locked to races which is finite. At the end, those challenges become ridiculous, expecting you to race 13 minutes against 5 Heat cops. Races likewise start becoming challenge in patience as they can be brutally long. Have fun losing at the end and having to restart the whole thing! So, the grind with this one is real and I’m not surprised that back then I sort of lost interest in the game. Everyone did and very few people get their BMW back.
Now another issue are with cops. Lets not pretend, cops were never good in Need for Speed games. In Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered I could negate them completely by slamming every new cop which enters the race and knocking them out thus ending chase in an instant. And that game supposedly has them better than in other games. Here system is annoying. Game tends to force too many encounters with them. On anything below Heat 5 level they are very annoying, because how easy it is to lose them. I have to babysit a cop until chase escalates and I can start fleeing. On Heat 5 it becomes annoying. You get special cheating cops with cars faster than yours. It is same in all Need for Speed games. So, it becomes about just racing and waiting until they make a mistake and crash into something. Gameplay is about endurance and whitling them down through attrition. However, cops will start to lay spike trips. They are super annoying, because if you hit even a pixel of it, you are instantly busted. It is really frustrating to have this arbitrary failure mode. It always feel cheap when you get caught this way. To make matters worse, they start putting SUVs which are really hard to force through. So, they lock up road entirely and it is up to RNG if you are going to punch through them. Last, but not least is how game handles “Busted” mechanic. If you slow down, a meter will start filling up where cops consider you to be caught. The only problem is that this meter is set way too aggressively and even moving slowly is enough for you to get caught. It is frustrating as if you lose speed even for a moment, it can spell defeat. Cop chases are tedious, easy and exhausting only to be frustrating with some BS mechanics which are way too powerful. The only time they become somewhat challenging to race against it at Heat 6 car. However, if you want a challenge you have to race them at Heat 7 level with recreational cars which are a lot slower than your end game cars. Sadly, that is available only on one challenge mission with one car. As a result, regular gameplay doesn’t have any challenge anymore for veteran gamer like myself.
In other Need for Speed games cops cheat by going way faster than they should in order to catch up with you. However, in this game cops don’t cheat this way. This can result in a lot of anti-climactic chases where you just wipe the entire force with one excellent trap. This then can force a hilarious situations where you are desperately trying to find cops in order for chase not to end. Game also has two states in one where it allows you to escape and another where it cheats and spawn cops. Both are frustrating in their own right as you can end the chase against your wishes and cops don’t naturally try to find you while you have to evade them or go to them. Game also cheats a lot as it can spawn cops on top of you. It can even cut cooldown (after certain period of time chase ends if cops don’t find you) timer down in order to give time for cops to find you. Imagine how fun it is to sit for a minute only to notice that timer gets reduced and cop is teleported nearly on top of you… Game will do it on some roads where NPCs normally dont roam in. Game is frustrating and cheats in its own way which takes away from the fun.
In this game cops will always try to initiate chases. After a race. During the race at random. When you are driving in open world. When you knock few things out in open world. During scripted story points. As you can see, it just becomes tiresome. It is a long game and you don’t want to be messing with an exhausting threat. Especially when you have often do to multiple runs with cops for milestone for each Blacklist driver. As there 15 of them, you can easily go into 50+ progression chases alone. Not to mention how many times I have to avoid forced chase after a race. The trick with them is to always go to menu and jump to the garage. This way you can just reset cops and roam to the next race. Likewise, if you are getting caught, ALT+F4 starts you with a progress before the chase and it reduces Heat level a little without any negative outcomes. This game becomes really tiresome as player doesn’t have an agency to play the way he likes it. Need for Speed Hot Pursuit had this thing fixed with player being able to choose races, repeat them to earn highest scores and you not tied to winning each of them initially, races have set chance or guarantee for cops and you can free roam in a lot more detailed world. While Most Wanted is a childhood classic, newer games had done gameplay better.
Graphically game suffers heavily from vomit filter. It is yellow filter over everything which pretentious and clueless game designers thought to be neat back then. It was hideous back then and it aged terribly. You can’t completely remove it, but you can set it to minimum. As mentioned previously, game still looks okay to this day. That is all what matters to have fun. Anything more is just cherry on top. As for the sandbox. City in which you are put in is functional. It is good for racing which uses it extensively. Traffic is not too bad and it is challenging and memorable in places. I still for example remembered those windmills in a highway. Likewise, music also felt nostalgic and familiar. Those are the old classics. However, game lacks further refinement which other racing games had. There are no secrets. No sights to be seen. Game has nothing going for it and city is made as an excuse to put racing missions all over the city. City serves no other function. Which was neat back in its time to have an open world gameplay and it is certainly a gold standard how racing game should be made today. However, lack of point of interests and secrets makes it feel dead. Newer games are a lot better in their own world which are interesting to explore just for the sake of it.
As for racing mechanics themselves. They are good. This is arcade racer which means that it is very forgiving. It is great as a starting point for more serious racing games. Slow time function is really helpful to take those aggressive turns which otherwise you couldn’t do. It really is “Get out of the jail” card for all those racing neanderthals who cannot figure out that you need to slow down before taking a corner. Chases themselves are good as cars smash through street objects and send them flying. Likewise, opponents crash into stuff just as well and they don’t seem to cheat too much nor they are obvious at it like in some later Need for Speed games. Opponents seem well balanced from start to finish as difficulty level raises steady without big difficulty spikes. You feel like you are fast. You feel excitement correctly taking corners, managing not to hit into the walls and game properly rewards you. If you play flawlessly, you will be well ahead of your competition.
However, game fees lacking. As it doesn’t have meaningful upgrades or long term customization of your car, game feels rather light on content. Its weather system is just a filter. It lacks day and night cycle or real rain. Likewise, I would had enjoyed seeing more fleshed out story. Maybe some cutscenes in a mid game to change story a bit. Game story is great for what it is. It is over the top, it starts strong, it is everything what game such as this needs. It keeps you interested and invested. However, it peeters out. There are no cinematics until the very end after you start the game proper. The little interaction you get are through voice messages. Voice actors do a good job, but they just don’t have anything to work with. The only thing in this 30+ hour game is a plot of someone setting up racers from within as cops show up to bust every race after you leave. This sub-plot doesn’t go anywhere and as you can imagine, game feels hollow. You mostly get messages saying “good job” and that is it. The last thing which I miss in this game are drift game mode. Game engine works quite well for drifting and I’m surprised that it isn’t in the game. It would be quite fun for some missions to play around enchanced drifting like in previous titles. That would really spicen things up. Likewise, rain could activate that “drift mode” in open world, creating real dynamic interactions and change of gameplay when it starts raining. In addition, if developers could have had added night races, that would had been sublime. And few more songs if I’m making a Christmas wish list.
As you can see, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this game. I just want more of it. This is a great sign that game is really good at its core. Sadly, Need for Speed franchise was milked to death at that time and over time developers couldn’t keep up. They couldn’t keep on delivering excellent games and games really dropped in quality afterwards. This game feels like it was undercooked. That it would had been a lot better with more content. As it was an amazing success, no doubt EA would had benefited from releasing Need for Speed Most Wanted 2 immediately after it. With new city and addressing its every shortcoming. Just remaking the same game, but bigger and better. That would had been enough to make it a big success and instant classic amongst gamers. However, milking machine had to keep on going and from this point, Need for Speed games became worse and worse until it sunk into irrelevancy. Their latest game – Unbound is a complete disgrace, Forza essentially became what Need for Speed needed to be. From entire two decades, I can only recommend Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. I think that it is the best Need for Speed game which I ever played, but it suffers from same issue as Most Wanted does. It really feels undercooked.
Need for Speed Most Wanted stood the test of time. I had completed main campaign. It was really fun at the beginning, but became tedious over time. It is a long game which gives you everything at a very start and then very little content up to the very end. It is kind of game which most people quit at some point and you cannot blame them. Game is overstretched. Overall, it is still fun to play and it is a good game to permanently sit on your computer when you want 10-30 minute short, easy race.