Need For Speed: Most Wanted

For those that don’t know, driving games are easily one of my favorite genre’s, and the Need For Speed series has always been one of the defining games, esp. for the PC.

NFS:MW cover
NFS:MW cover

And Most Wanted is definatly no exception…
Being one of the first games to use HDR in the racing genre( the only other that springs to mind being Burnout: Revenge) it looks fantastic, despite me having to drop one res set to be able to play it smoothly…

Most Wanted takes the best elements from two of NFS’ best games; by adding Hot Pursuit to Underground 2 they have created a massive free-roaming fast-paced driving game
Along with the police presence comes a new feature: SpeedBreaker.
This feature allows you, for a limited period of time, to slow the pace so you can spot better lines through traffic  and can be a life saver when being chased.

The aim of the game, without giving too much away, is to climb up the ‘blacklist’, a list of most wanted cars by the police, and become the most notorious street racer.
Featuring more than 30 customizable cars, and a set of challenge trials to help improve your skills, this game, like the others, has massive replayability.

The soundtrack for this game, is probably my favorite soundtracks for a game yet, featuring;
Disturbed, Static-X, The Prodigy and tracks by artist Paul Linford, who seems to have taken great inspiration from Travor Rabnin who notably wrote the soundtrack to Gone In 60 Seconds, not that this is a bad thing.
The music will also change as you do different things, to quote:

“Custom-designed to adapt to the players’ every move, the music highlights the intensity of the chase, telling you when you’re about to get away… or about to get busted.”

The game becomes even more immursive  with both EAX, providing great surround sound, and force feedback, letting you feel everything coming through the wheels.

To sum up, this is indeed a fantastic game that lives up to the expectations that the NFS series has built for itself. Well worth a play.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that’s been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.

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