This is by far the longest and most difficult racing game I have ever played. I have played all the NFS games except for Hot Pursuit 2 because of bad reviews that it got.
The career mode is not much different, except that there are like 15 levels to beat, with an average of 10 races each and challenges to beat. The challenges are most of time fun, but can be extremely frustrating and repetitive. For example, one challenge requires you to tag 10 cop cars (bump into 10 cop cars) and then successfully escape the cop pursuit. The same challenge in the next level requires you to tag 12 cop cars. And then the next one requires tagging 15 cars, and so on.. It can get tedious and frustrating, especially if you get busted by the cops because you will have to start it all over again (usually taking up to 10 minutes or more per challenge).
The cop cars seem to have superman abilities right from the start, although they are not too difficult at first. Even my maxed-out car after beating the game is still not as agile or speedy as any of the cop cars. A cop car could go from 0 to 150 mph in like 2 seconds whatsoever. Guys, this is unrealistic. I did not quite enjoy this far-fetched feature with cop chases.
I liked the movies at the beginning of the game--it was a fun thing to watch, but then there were no more movies all the way until the very end of the game. Just one more short movie at the end, and that was it. In the meantime, I felt rather left out and lonely during these 50-60 hours of completing races and challenges.
Pesonally, I favored the first Underground more than the second one or this one. The first reason is because of graphics. While the graphics are very good with this one, it did not seem as appealing to me as it did with the first Underground. I could probably blame it on the large, jaw-dropping jump in the quality of graphics that was faced when encountering Underground 1 compared to previous games. The best part of this Most Wanted game is the interactive, breakable objects in the game. This time (although a little unrealistic), a street-light pole would break off if my car ran into it, slowing my car down only a teeny little bit (probably too little if my car is going real fast). I liked that part, and the part where I could destroy the cop cars by driving under a gas station and blowing up the gas pumps. Unrealistic though, but fun. Back to the graphics part... I really miss the cheering people at the start and finish line of races. They were removed from Underground 2, and never returned. It made me feel much more lonely, like as if I were just some robot racing with other robot cars. Remember the Street Fighter 2 games? The cheering people in the background were fun to watch at and added a great sense of entertainment. I do not care if it affects the graphics--the option to turn it off was there in Underground 1 anyway. Lastly, about graphics, the bloom effect of lighting was blinding! If I turned on either overbright or visual treatment, some of the glowing lights would block everything else. The glare from the sunshine would be purposedly blinding so that I could not see anything in front of me. It was wayyyyy overdone! The visual treatment does seem nice at times, but sometimes the entire atmosphere looks orange-ish gold. Even the road would look golden instead of gray, up to half of the time (according to the changing daylight---the sunlight is not THAT ORANGE! disgusting..). Motion blur can no longer be turned off in the game--the only way is to tweak the Windows registry. Motion blur is a little exaggerated also, and would start distorting the view even if I was going only 70 mph. Imagine how bad motion blur would get at 200 mph! Well, like with the previous Underground series, the level of detail and the quantity of detail was amazing. I think it took hundreds of people to make this game (judging from the LONG end credits).
The sound was ok. Not bad, but not the best. Nowadays, most of music sucks anyway. It only offered stereo sound (no 5.1 sound support!). Only the XBox360 version offered 5.1 sound.
The handling of cars are hardly any different from the Underground series, except that there is less of an ability to power slide or drift (which might be more realistic). The worst thing about handling in this game is that if my car lightly hits the side-rail head-on at say, 40 degree angle, it would be impossible for me to push my car against the side-rail no matter how fast I am going. I would have to completely let go of the gas and keep steering in that direction, hoping that my car would re-align itself. If it is more than a 45 degree angle, then my car comes to a complete halt, forcing me to change my gears into reverse and back up in order to continue forward. I think that the reason why the physics were changed that way is so that it won't be too easy with escaping cop chases when the police cars are surrounding you. I greatly disliked that (and the fact that all cop cars had jet-like engines and brakes on them).
Yeah, I liked some of the cop challenges, but missed the drift challenges. One of my favorite modes was to try to destroy as many signs, street-lights and do as much damage as possible to other traffic and cop cars in order to increase my fines beyond a certain limit.
It was SO difficult during the last third of the game that I felt like completely giving up! (And resorting to cheats, shhh..) Although the traffic was not as punishing (I could crash into a car and only lose like 60-80 mph), the traffic would get worse as the game progressed. Near the end of the game, sometimes the traffic was so bad that there were cars everywhere in the "right" spots. How was I supposed to manuever around these cars at a required speed of 180+ mph? The time requirements also became seemingly impossible for winning time-trail races.
Last, some of the cars were better at handling than others. I mean, wayyyy better at handling than others for some strange reasons. In real life, a certain make (McLaren) should be be better than a run-of-the-mill mustang, but a slightly tweaked Mustang beats a fully tweaked McLaren hands-down! The RX-7 and RX-8 were my favorites, but no longer did very well when fully tweaked with Junkman parts compared to others. Some cars won at the end had strangely exceptional handling compared to my maxed-out cars.
It's a LONG game. There are about 100 races, (although more drag races would have been appreciated) along with SIXTY-NINE repetitive challenges! The fun part about the challenges is that I got to drive different, interesting cars. It takes about 60 to 80 hours, or more to complete 100% of the game.
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