Need for Speed: Most Wanted, the latest from the people who brought you Burnout, isn't just a racing game.
The feeling I get from playing Most Wanted, released on Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, is something more akin to playing a wide-open role-playing game like Skyrim.
This realization came to me when I drifted my $125,000 Maserati recklessly around a corner and clipped a cop car. Such a mistake comes with a penalty in Most Wanted: The cops get a touch upset. Before long, five police cars were tailing me on a highway road trying to smash my car into the median and tear apart my tires with spike strips.
I was able to elude them long enough to escape, but the chase was so much fun I decided to do it again on purpose. So I smashed headlong into the first police car I found, then gleefully sped away from the sound of sirens.
Suddenly I was having flashbacks to the weeks I spent immersed in last year's open-world role-playing game. The most fun I ever had in Skyrim was never in completing epic quests or slaying dragons, but in ticking off the city guards and seeing if I could elude capture without being thrown in jail.
There are many differences between these two games, but they share a philosophy that says the game makers don't have a right to tell the player how to spend their time in this wide-open world. If you want to play this like a normal racing game and enter into the pre-determined competitions, that's fine. If you'd rather spend your time trying to ramp off the roofs of buildings, that's also fine. I chose to spend a considerable amount of my time in Most Wanted breaking the law within view of the police, and nobody can say I'm wrong.
A distinct role-playing game structure underlies the whole Most Wanted experience.
For instance, the main attraction of the game is the series of races that are found throughout the city. Completing them gains you better equipment for your cars. As you drive through the city, even if you're just joyriding, you'll gain points that move you up the city's "Most Wanted" list. When you reach a new rank you'll depose one of the city's previous street-racing elite and gain the chance to race them head-to-head. If you can manage to beat them and destroy their car you'll add their ride to your own stable of autos.
In other words, you'll complete quests to earn experience points and equipment so you can face the big boss of the dungeon and get a chance to take his epic sword. Car. Either way.
The openness of the experience proves powerful when combined with this RPG-lite framework. Your mission is to ascend the ranks, but there's no time constraint. You're free to wander off at any moment – even in the middle of a race! – if something strikes your interest.
Meanwhile, if you start feeling aimless, a few button presses will have you back on a structured path again.
Need For Speed Most Wanted is a fantasy RPG for anyone who's ever daydreamed about smashing the car in front of them in traffic, speeding away from the cops, or driving up a half-finished building at a construction site.
But whereas typical fantasy games tweak reality by giving players powerful weaponry and magical spells, Most Wanted gives you access to state-of-the-art, quarter-million-dollar automobiles and lifts the oppressive Earthly limitations of friction and gravity. With those two pesky natural laws heavily tweaked in favor of street racing, you're free to wander the city, engage your whims, and drive however you please.
