The GOAT!

You have a campaign with objectives, clear instructions, and a beginning and ending. It doesn't get better than that, and the soundtrack is awesome too.

THEN YOU SLOWLY RECALL ON YOUR MIND

was it fucking worth it?

As I am writing this right now, my car is perched atop a bus station, watching endless amounts of police cars slam themselves into the pillars below me as i rest motionless. Once I've rested long enough for the timer and bounty counts to reach their arbitrarily high numbers, I will retreat back into the bus station on a raised platform, where either the police will not realize what I am attempting to pull and they will remain under me at a length just far enough for the game to consider myself having evaded the cops, or they will catch onto my shenanigans, drive up to my platform, and catch me red-handed, putting the past 20 minutes or so of idling to waste, and forcing me to start over from square one. Yep, that's me. You are probably wondering how I got here, so allow me to explain.

I've been quite the fan of racing games these past few years, so I've been giving the NFS series a solid go. I've heard from many people that Most Wanted '05 was the pinnacle of the series, the thrilling fan-favorite before the slow but certain decline. "The cop chases are awesome", I've heard. After hearing all the hype, I grabbed myself a (surprisingly pricy all things considered) copy of the "definitive" Xbox 360 version, played through the Underground duology for context, and went to driving. The thing about this game is that it's strongest and most unique improvements are also the sharpest double-edged sword that makes this game so much less enjoyable compared to it's predacessors imo.

The game itself is pretty similar to the previous years NFS, Underground 2, albiet with some additions and changes. The open world is still there, though the game now offers a menu to just quick-jump to races instead of needing to spend time driving to waypoints. It definitely gives the game a much snappier pace to it, at the cost of making the free roam mode almost entirely optional unless you need to go to a car shop (and even then I found the fastest way to do that is to just go back to the safe house and use the shops right next to it). The races still feel just as weighty and solid as previous titles, cars still feel good to drive, and the drift/streetcross events are omitted from previous games. The dreaded drag race events are regrettably still here, but they are so few and far between that it's really not much of an issue imo. The races are still as fun as ever, and like Underground 2 the racing difficulty strikes a nice balance in never making you too far ahead, but also not going turbo overboard like Underground 1 did with the rubber banding. Races are still fun and cool!

The vibe of this game is also entirely different from previous games. We have gone full 7th gen mid-2000s edgy punk vibes by now, baby. This game is DRENCHED with that iconic Xbox 360 piss filter, races take place in a shady, dirgy, late-afternoon city rather than the neon-lit night life vibes that the Underground games carried. The muddy pallete isn't to say that this game is bland, it's still quite stylized after the dirty vibes that they are going for. Whenever you clear an event, the game shows a picture of your car at the time of winning, shown through various dynamic camera angles depending on how you finished, all shown through a detailed background of asphalt and concrete. The game has more of an edgy plot this time around; it's a revenge story. Your unnamed street racer man is doing street racer things when this sunnuvabitch challenges you, cheats the race by rigging your car beforehand, tries to steal your girl, and gets to the top of the street underworld using YOUR ride. It's up to you to rise up the hooligan leaderboards by taking out the top 15 racers to finally give that mfer a piece of your mind. Essentially, this is car-themed No More Heroes. Instead of the CG cutscenes of the previous games, this uses live-action FMV actors for the cutscenes and it is gloriously cheesy. Each member of the Blacklist has their own intro that looks like it came straight out of a trashy MTV reality show, complete with stylized graffiti tags for every member. The cheesy cutscenes if anything felt more like the series was going back to its roots on the 3DO, as the very first Need For Speed game had quite similiarly playful live-action cutscenes. My only wish was that the game could have had more to show in its narrative, as most of the cutscenes are at the very beginning of the game. It certainly knows how to set the mood really damn well though!

All of this falls apart with the newest gimmick this game offers; the famous cop chases. Cop chases are an iconic aspect of the original Need for Speed games, so this game brings them back after their absense in the Underground games. Sometimes while minding your own business, a cop can find you and instigate a cop chase. Evading the cops for long enough gets your heat gauge up, which gets more cops to show up until the game reaches cartoonish levels of police activity, flooding your screen with so many cops wanting to ram your ass you'd think you are playing Dynasty Warriors in Detroit. Cops can also sometimes rear their heads into you mid-race which turns things chaotic as now you have to handle both your opposition as well as your newfound persuers. All of this sounds good on paper, and at first the chases were really fun to do! The problem comes from the persuit milestones. In order to deem yourself worthy to challenge the next Blacklist opponent, you need to pass these arbitrary challenges, and they just get increasingly rediculous as time goes on. Stuff like "ram into 25 different police vehicles", "bypass 12 different police blockades", "stay in a persuit for longer than 13 minutes", etc. What's annoying about it it feels like the point of the higher heat levels feels more like a timer system a-la old arcade games making a higher effort to kill you the longer you linger, yet the milestones feel like they are set at directly counterintuitive goals, focused on farming RNG elements that are usually outside of your control (like when and where blockades spawn, or how many of certain cop cars can show up). Make a mistake and get busted, and you lose all of your progress for that chase, which gets REALLY frustrating when you lose 15+ minutes of chase progress to something stupid like a random truck in traffic running into you or a slightly uneven piece of terrain geometry catches you up. Get busted too many times, and you lose your car, and if you lose all your cars it's game over, so there's a significant punishment to messing up chases. I can understand why people see the high difficulty as a good sense of tension, but I really HATE it when games make me feel like I'm wasting my time, and the chases in this game felt so much like that. It never felt like whenever I got busted that it was a mistake on my end, but rather just some unfortunate circumstance that happened from the game deciding my time was up and launching 5 different waves of suicidal armored police SUVs on my ass that launch me into the pirhana pit of 20 cops chasing my ass. Like imagine playing Pac Man, but every minute the game adds another ghost to avoid, and the game just gives you dumb objectives like "eat 30 ghosts", forcing you to linger until things get too much. Eventually things got too much for me, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted became Need to Cheese: the Wanted System as I learned about the handy Bus Stop exploit that I have been using this whole time. And even then, sometimes the bus stop trick doesn't work and your time gets wasted anyways!!!! The only way to leave cop chases is to escape or get busted too, there's not even an option to quit to the menu in the pause screen so if a cop comes when you are trying to do something else enjoy having your time wasted!!!!!!! gaming!!!!!!!!

Idk man, this game certainly has vibes but the cop chases just made this game absolutely sour for me. I think I've come to realize from playing this and the Underground games that these games aren't really designed with the premise of actually being "cleared", and the fun comes more from being able to just drive around and vibe in the game. Because in my times playing any of these games so far, I've noticed that they revel in dragging themselves out way too far, wasting any progess-seeking players time. For every time I was vibing with the races and aesthetics, I was absolutely livid with frustration at watching my sweet time go to deadass nothing. The Blacklist 15 could have been the blacklist 10 and the point would have still made its way across imo.

Anyways, I was able to make it through that final cop milestone, so time to finish this game. I noticed one of the cop cars try to drive up and bust me while I was writing this, but they backed up and left on their own instead. Perhaps the game has finally taken pity on me, and realized enough has been enough. Usually I don't write reviews of stuff before having seen the credits roll, but I feel at this point my opinions have solidified and by the time anyone reads this, the deed will have been done.

After so many years, I finally understood what all the hype was about. The only thing I don't understand is why people prefer Underground 2 to Most Wanted. The original MW blows NFSU2 out of the water, easily.

Almost everything that was wrong with NFSU2 has been fixed, and only the good parts remain. The linear progression deserves special praise, and I loved how they incorporated it into the game with the Blacklist approach. The open world is still there, but you no longer have to drive from one event to another, which saves a lot of time.

The biggest addition is the cop chases, and they've done a great job with the implementation. The cops are really fun to mess with and you as a racer have a real chance against them. The police chatter is probably the best I've ever heard in an arcade racing game.

I actually liked the story. Sure, it's a bit cheesy, but it motivated me to finish the game and climb to the top of the Blacklist.

There are only a few minor issues with the game. I found the open world a little bland and boring. I also wish they had kept the extensive customization from NFSU2.

Unlike NFSU2, I didn't use any mods to improve the pacing or balance of the game. The only mods I used were to restore the Xbox 360 visuals to the PC version.

With a few tweaks, this could have been the perfect racing game. I'm glad I finally gave it a shot.

As the warm summer sun beats down on you, you come home from a long day of playing football or basketball with your friends. You feel exhausted but also excited to unwind with your favorite pastime. You power on your PC and load up the classic game Most Wanted. The familiar sounds and graphics transport you back to a simpler time, and you can't help but smile as you settle in for a night of gaming fun. The rush of nostalgia is so intense that you can't imagine anyone else not feeling it, too. It's a feeling that brings back beautiful memories of endless summer days.
The soundtrack is also great, lets not forget