The simple but effective progression of upgrading your car in the context of street racing and good driving, years of iterative development reflected in the best sense, are not enough to deal with the stretched out rhythm of the game that keeps adding more and more filler. Thankfully, except for the horrible mode where you are focusing on changing gears, most of the race types are good, at the end of the day filler here means more races. But even then, the cool idea of the scaling rankings in the blacklist loses its edge with so many samey races and you start driving passively.

The element that could have saved the game is already written in the title. The most notable improvement of this entry is in the police chases, and it shows. The otherwise unnecessary open world that even the game tries to ignore comes to sense in the pursuits. Cops won’t let you breathe once you have a high enough bounty, and this many roads open help to give life to the chasings. Sometimes you just need to be tailed by 10 cops on a golf course to understand. And, while being chased by cops and inflicting lethal damage to them is the only trend from 2005 that I miss, the idea doesn’t fully work, as the filler gets in here too.

There is this cool arcady concept where you need to raise your bounty to enter some races as proof of your status. This makes the chase not only a game about escaping but a game where you also have to bait the cops. Not trusting that this could be good enough, the game adds secondary (but obligatory to some degree) objectives, that on later pursuits ruin any of the organic intensity. Now you don’t smash the cops because you want to, but because you have to smash 20 cops to complete an objective. Even some of the milestones are contradictory signaling how uninspired they are, sometimes you need to make the chases shorter than a given time and some other times longer. Messing around with the police but only to get your homework done.