This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Chuck Landry.
I skipped the last Need
for Speed. Underground was a bit
too “cool” for me to even give it a chance. The street-racing scene was a
little too much for me to swallow, and so I missed a supposedly great game
because I was turned off by its “urban” flare. But I love the Need for Speed
series. NFS 2 was one of the first
games I ever played using a 3D graphics accelerator in a PC. It was a 3D
Monster FX chip, and it kicked ass. The pinnacle of the NFS series was when
they called in the fuzz. There was something about outrunning and/or
outmaneuvering the cops that brought NFS to a whole new level.
Need for Speed: Most
Wanted aims to combine the flashy tuner world with the thrill of escaping
the black and whites into one seriously fast racer. In Most Wanted your goal is
notoriety. You’ll begin the game as another racer strips you of your car, and
you must climb your way up the Black List 15, becoming the most disreputable street
racer in town before you can get it back. Along the way you’ll race against
several min-bosses (other ranking racers) who each have their own strengths and
weaknesses.
What makes Most Wanted different from Underground and
Underground 2 is, of course, the police force. Police chases promise to be the
most exciting part of the game, and videos of the unfinished product confirm
it. You might start off against three or four cop cars early on, but as you
progress you’ll face six, eight, or even twelve at one time. The developers
also claim the police will use real-world tactics to try and bring you to a
stop, including rolling roadblocks and the like. Players will have some nice
tricks at their disposal to give them an edge, including a bullet-time mode to
let you squeeze through a small gap or dodge a messy wreck. There will also be
areas marked on your map that provide some sort of diversion. The only one I’ve
seen thus far is where by hitting a column, you can make a giant donut fall off
of a cafe and block the road behind you, letting you escape.
Need for Speed Most Wanted is coming out on just about every
platform you can imagine, so clearly what makes the Xbox 360 version special
are its graphics. Most Wanted supports 760p resolution for HD monitors and all
sorts of special effects that you won’t see on the other versions. The cars
look absolutely amazing thanks to the sheer number of polygons that go into
modeling each one, and effects like normal and bump mapping on the textures. The
entire color scheme of Most Wanted is gritty brown and washed out, giving it a
dusty and grimy look. The result is a very stylized environment we haven’t seen
before in a racer, and judging by the screenshots and videos available, I’d say
it works very well.
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