“I want every single unit after the guy.”
“Everyone?”
“EVERYONE!”

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is not a hard game, but it is an annoying one. There’s fun to be had, for sure, but too often it is brought to a frustrating halt by some design elements that seem to randomly select when the player succeeds and fails. There’s a nice mix of race types to go along with the open world, which you will come to know very well as you find the best routes for shaking the police pursuits off your tail. There’s a handful of real cars to choose from and the controls feel very smooth, especially as the attributes of your ride improve. It’s a decent game, but it could have been much better if it didn’t have a few nagging issues.

The game combines aspects from two of the series’ earlier games, Hot Pursuit and Underground, giving you a gritty open world to explore as well as a maniacal and bountiful police force to contend with. There is a story, as cheesy as it is, which tries to meld the two different gameplay elements into something cohesive. To start the game, you are driving a slick BMW M3 in a race against Razor (his real name is Clarence, which is maybe a nod to 8 Mile). Soon, you learn that your ride has been tampered with, leaving a streak of oil at the starting line. Losing the race results in a loss of the BMW. So now your goal is to climb fifteen spots up the Blacklist to challenge Razor for the top spot, and along the way you’ll develop a reputation with the local police force. The game concludes with the defeated Blacklist racers getting grabbed by the police and an epic final chase launched by a cutscene that hilariously parodies Léon: The Professional.

In order to move up a spot on the Blacklist, you must win races, rack up your cumulative bounty to a certain number, and achieve certain milestones that involve unruly activities. The races are fun and varied. There are standard sprints, circuits, and drag races, but some unique race types as well. My two favorites were solo time trials, where the player races to a series of toll booths, receiving only a small amount of time to get to each and failing the challenge if you miss one; and the speed traps, essentially sprints against other racers, but with a handful of specific points on the route where your speed is clocked and factored into deciding the winner (i.e. you don’t have to finish the race first to win). Many people dislike the toll booth races because the streets are often much less trafficked and if your car is powerful enough the races aren’t really a challenge. However, I found them to be a nice change of pace from the breakneck intensity of the competitive races and police pursuits.

Bounty is accrued by doing illegal things in front of a police officer, such as damaging property, driving off the roadway, hit and runs, ramming a police officer, etc. You can rack up “heat levels” on specific cars which adds a multiplier to each violation and draws more combative police vehicles. The milestones put specific objectives on your bounty gathering—break through two roadblocks; tag five police vehicles; evade the police in less than five minutes. At first, when your car has no heat on it and your sights are set low, these are easy. Around the city there are many “pursuit breakers” that the player can drive through to hinder the officers pursuing them. You can knock over billboards, explode gas pumps, topple scaffolding, that sort of thing. Once you’ve been out of sight of the police for a few heartbeats, various hiding places will appear on your map; finding one will increase the rate that your cooldown meter fills up, ending the pursuit faster.

I became frustrated with the game when the milestones became outrageous. Drive through eight roadblocks with spike strips, tag thirty-two police vehicles, etc. Actually achieving these things was not that difficult, but for them to count you have to evade the police. Once you’ve racked up a body count of thirty-two, though, you’re going to have a dozen cop cars on your tail, and a roadblock in your path every thirty seconds. It was a real annoyance to lure a cadre of pursuers through three or four pursuit breakers, be halfway to activating the cooldown phase, and have another officer spawn right in front of me. Other times, I would hit a pursuit breaker—which always causes a mini-cutscene to occur—then when I was given back control of my car I was a few feet from from slamming into a wall, and three of the pursuing vehicles would have miraculously made it through the falling debris unscathed and would be boxing me in. Busted again.

It’s funny—every time you boot up the game, it begins with a crop-topped Josie Maran warning the player that they should do all of their street-racing in the game, as if, had the warning not been there, the developers may have been chastised for encouraging young players to incite hot pursuits. I’m trying to imagine a AAA shooter beginning with a roughneck soldier saying, “make sure you do all of your killing in the game, kids.”

My other major gripe with the game is what many people call “rubberbanding.” Though I don’t play many racing games, I know it is fairly common to see AI programmed this way. Basically, the other racers are always performing to your level. If you’re sloppy out of the gate, your opponents will get ahead of you, but if you perform decently after that, you’ll be within striking distance at the end. On the flipside of that, you can string together a magnificent series of turns, absolutely nail all of your drifts, and feel like you’re a real pro. Then you’ll come over a crest in the road and find two MACK trucks blocking the road, and slam into one head-on (a common occurrence that doesn’t actually slow you down very much because your car doesn’t take damage). A few seconds later your opponent will fly past you, completely avoiding the chaos; apparently they were also stringing together the run of their lives, plus they can see through solid ground so they knew to swerve around the trucks. If the AI racers need to take a 150 degree turn at ninety miles an hour they will do so, with unreal timing and physics, while you are forced to brake down to fifteen mph to complete the turn without flipping your vehicle.

But when the game works as it should it is spectacular and gives the player a real rush. The formula of race, earn cash, buy new cars and upgrade is good, but the best moments occur when the police pursuits pan out as intended. They’re hilariously over-the-top, with pairs of SUVs trying to ram you head on, half a dozen corvettes trying to box you in, and eventually, a chopper kicking up dust in your face. But they’re also truly intense and anxiety-inducing, causing your heart to race as you make split-second decisions at 150 mph as a police dispatcher commentates your escapade and tire screeches and crunching metal blend with the rap-rock soundtrack.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a great game when things go as they should, but a few annoying design choices and technical glitches hampered my enjoyment of it.