Need for Speed: Most Wanted [PC]

As someone who's been playing the NFS series since virtually the beginning, it's been interesting to watch the franchise evolve and branch out. We've had an all-Porsche game, two Fast and the Furious-inspired offshoots, and Hot Pursuit, my personal favorite. And that's not to mention NFS poking its way into handheld territory. The competition has stayed hot and heavy the whole while, with Midnight Club, Burnout, and others putting up some great installments. With Most Wanted combining Hot Pursuit with Underground 2's open-ended blingfest, the Need for Speed series might have found a happy middle between telling a story and providing fun racing, so we got our hands on a build to find out for ourselves.

Like most other racing games on the PC, you'll definitely want a gamepad. Otherwise, you can only steer with the arrow keys, an all-or-nothing steering dynamic that will get really old really fast. Thankfully, we have one of those USB Xbox 360 controllers lying around, although a deadspot seems pretty tough to finagle, which is why there's a bit of drunken weaving in the video clips we grabbed. Other than that, the feel of the car on the road veers more towards simulation than arcade, with an extra bit of drift and more control required when bursting off the line and out of a turn. You can really see the suspension at work. It's no Gran Turismo, but it's not as slide-happy as Burnout, for better or worse. Either way, it feels more realistic than NFS Underground 2. You don't get the sense of speed that you do in Burnout, since EA apparently decided to remove speed blur (unless you're using nitrous), although that may be a quirk of this build. But you also can't eat it in Most Wanted. Instead, you just bounce off the obstacle. Less realistic, sure, but also less aggravating. On the other hand, that means the other cars won't go bailing off the road either.

The game still looks quite nice, although I would recommend a GeForce 6800-class card for the best results. There's a lot of bells and whistles, with road textures reminiscent of PGR2, painterly sky textures, weather effects, reflections, shadows, and adjustable geometry levels on the cars and the environment. Instead of using HDR, EA chose to implement "overbright," which simulates some of the light bloom effects without being too overpowered. There's lots of options to tweak to get the right balance between performance and looks, although some pop-up descriptions would be nice, because some of the titles aren't very descriptive. Either way, those looking for the best load times will probably want to go with the PC version, as they're almost non-existent. This is quite handy when you simply want to restart a race.

Sound is also quite good, with a wide variety of rumbling engines, throaty growls, and skidding tires. The police chatter sounds pretty authentic as well, except for the occasional lack of locational info. You'll know that they're chasing you, but they'll don't oftensay what intersection you just went through, or what freeway you're on, or even what direction you're heading in.