Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) is overrated

Yup. You heard me.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) is the most overrated game in the series.

However, overrated doesn’t mean bad. Far from it.

The car list, the amazing police chases, the great customization, the fantastic, edgy Hot Topic wearing and pierced earing, teenager focused, soundtrack. The overall tone of the game is something that NFS and EA hasn’t touched on since it came out, and that’s sad. However, that doesn’t make this the best game in the series. Far from it.

1.) The “Story”
Let me get something straight. First off, just because a racing game has a storyline, doesn’t mean it’s good. I feel as if a story is used to mask an otherwise boring, repetitive campaign. There are several examples of games that do this technique of throwing in a shallow, boring story, with shallow, overdramatic characters that treat racing like a religion and not a sport, and shallow plot twists that make me say “Oh. Ok…” and move on to the next boring repetitive mission. R: Racing Evolution, Need for Speed Carbon, Undercover, The Run, Rivals, 2015, TOCA Race Driver and several others, I feel, follow this trend and this kills the game for me.

2.) Repetition, and an underwhelming career mode.
“But Dustin (yes that’s my name), racing games in nature are supposed to be repetitive. Just because this game’s a little repetitive, doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
Yes and no. There are several racing games that try to make new gameplay choices to help spice things up. Driver: San Francisco had the amazing and sadly forgotten “SHIFT” mechanic which lets you jump from car to car without having you get out of yours. It was a mechanic that was handled in an amazing way, that I wish more studios could take and put to good use. That, and the combination of open-world collectables, the amazing racing, the PERFECT (yes, PERFECT.) handling model, an interesting story with actually decent characters and an actually decent story where you play as a cop in a coma (with the ability to control other people’s bodies in his dream, hence the “SHIFT” mechanic’s integration into the story), the solid car list, and the amazing cop chases where you can be both cop and racer, is proof that not all racing games have to be as repetitive as Most Wanted. That and D:SF is a phenomenal, nearly perfect game.

Another great example of a racing game that wasn’t repetitive was Need for Speed: Pro Street. The most underrated game in the series. In that game, you had 4 different types of racing. Standard lapped racing, drifting, drag racing and point to point, breakneck, Speed races. You would constantly go between these 4 different types, and this was one of the ways they shattered the repetition you normally get in these games. That, and finally owning a drag car that can pull a 6 second quarter mile is one of the most satisfying feelings I’ve ever felt in a video game. Not just in a racing game. Sure, I’ll admit the handling model is the equivalent of NFS:MW (2005) but with even more understeer, and the game did get a bit easier near the end, but that doesn’t mean this game was at all bad, nor too repetitive, and that’s the point.

3.) The “rubber-banding”
Imagine this. You’re in first place for nearly the entire race. You start in first place, and you reach the final stretch at 200 MPH+ in your riced-out SLR McLaren, and then suddenly, even though you’re draining all your boost into this final stretch, suddenly, out comes that damn Punto that overtakes you at speeds that could shatter windows, and you lose. You must start all over with this stupid, damn, annoying, 5-minute race. Sucks the fun right out of you, right? Imagine having this happen throughout the entire campaign, especially with that Blacklist member with the EVO VIIII. I hate that guy. This happens in not only this game, but so many others in an attempt to keep the race “interesting”. All it does is fuel my frustration, and I can’t be the only one who thinks this, right? Right?

4.) The visuals.
Now, keep in mind that I’m playing the PS2 version. Why does Underground 2 look better in certain circumstances? Hell, sometimes the first Underground looked better. I get that the Xbox 360 version is the best when it comes to visuals, and now the PC version is dirt cheap, but despite this, there were some better-looking games at the time. Gran Turismo 4 could output 1080p high definition (For a PS2 game, that’s amazing), Halo 3 looked amazing, Motor storm even had actual damage modeling, and that came out nearly a year after this came out and PGR3 had just the perfect mix of colors and damage modeling, just to name a few. The point is that the PS2 version looked like garbage, and sometimes ran like garbage. The frame rate would drop so low at points, to the point that I would get migraines (thanks EA…), and the Xbox 360 never left a strong impression.

5.) The lack of modes.
Remember the amount of modes you could do in NFS Underground 2? There was lapped and sprint races, ACTUALLY GOOD DRAG RACING, drifting, Street X and the URL too. There were so many modes to tune your cars to and it helped make this racing game so much more fun and less repetitive as a result. In Most Wanted, there really were only 4 different modes to choose from. The standard lapped and sprint racing, the pursuits, the pretty fun tollbooth races and the drag racing. First off, I hate the drag racing in this game. Dodging traffic was downright impossible at times, the rubber-banding mentioned earlier seemed even worse here at times, and you didn’t even get your own locations to drag race, like in Underground 2. The drag racing just felt rushed. The racing, personally, got way to repetitive at times, and the rubber-banding didn’t help either, and the two actually good modes in this game were the pursuits, which are amazing (don’t get me wrong, they were AMAZING), and the tollbooths. Sometimes, the two could combine for some seriously amazing racing. Other than that though, we needed the drifting back, and the Street X and maybe the URL too for good measure.

When you're in first, but a taxi magically appears out of thin air and turns your Viper into a sardine can with you in it.

Now comes the biggest reason why this game is overrated. Why? Because if it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t even have made this post.

6.) The rabid fans

     Everyone treats this like the second coming of Christ, when really, it isn’t. It’s not a bad game. Not at all. But is it the best game in the NFS series, spanning 20 years, or would you go as far as to say it’s the best racing game of all time? 
Personally, no. There are so many flaws with this game that it didn’t even go on my Top 5 Need for Speed games post that I made so long ago. 
Sure, it’s mostly opinionated, but at the same time, there are so many flaws. The visuals, the repetitiveness, the cringe inducing cutscenes, the one gameplay gimmick where you can lose your car if you got busted is useless when you can just turn off your console, which is what I did. Despite the fact that there was even a way you could get past this, which was by making it so that when you were close to getting busted, the game would make it so that if you turn off the game, you lose your car. Hell, Midnight Club L.A did that and it worked so much better than this (By the way, MCLA is another amazing game). There were so many things that personally ticked me off with this title that I couldn’t even finish the damn thing when I had it.  It just bored me to death.

When you beat a blacklist member and realize that you now have to do the same races over and over 8 times in a row.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t like it if I don’t.

If this was the game that got you into the series, then that’s understandable. If it was the game that made you get into the JDM culture and somehow inspired you to get involved into the massive car culture, then please explain why. If this game inspired you to become a game designer, or a game developer in any way, please explain. If you hate my guts right now, and want to kill me, then explain how in as much detail as you want. I may have sounded harsh, but I swear I won’t bite.
I promise.

I just personally felt that this game left a hole where my dream game was supposed to go. Hell, I played more of the 2012 reboot than the 2005 original.

sigh…

     At least we have Payback, which is like the team at Ghost Games took my complaints from MW and managed to make a whole game around it, but that’s for another time.