Need for Speed Most Wanted

In the game, players take part in illegal street races across Most Wanted’s setting, utilizing a variety of licensed real-world cars that can be upgraded and customized with new parts while contending with the involvement of the police in their efforts to impede the player. Racing events feature a mixture of competitive racing across circuit or point-to-point races, and checkpoint, sprint and drag races. The game features three modes of play – Career, Quick Race, and Challenge Series – with a fourth mode allowing for multiplayer being available to players on certain console editions.

While many of the racing events feature those used in previous entries in the games, particularly the Underground set of games, some events – Drifting, Street X, Underground Racing League tournaments and Outrun – are absent from Most Wanted, and replaced with two new ones. The game features a selection of stock cars to choose from, each of which can be modified during the game’s career mode with upgrades to enhance its performance and visual appearance.

Customization of the car’s appearance is limited; the main emphasis of customization is to reduce the car’s heat level rather than for reputation as in the Underground series – while some elements that were possible in the previous installments were removed, others received minor changes such as players being able to make use of whole body kits on cars, the use of only one vinyl for the vehicle, and exterior colours being limited to the car’s main body, wheels and window tinting.

Additional cars are available for the player to use – most of which are acquired from the game’s Blacklist Racers or unlocked after defeating a Blacklist Racer, while others are bonuses available from completing challenges; a number of cars available in the game are exclusives added in by the Black Edition copy of the game. Police cars cannot be driven in the game, except during special events in the game’s Challenge Series mode. For Most Wanted exotic cars (such as the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, Lamborghini Murciélago, and Ford GT) are reintroduced into the series alongside the tuner cars after the Underground titles only focused on tuner cars. 

Most Wanted, like the Underground series, avoids the use of major vehicle damage on all racing models, with only scratched paint and heavily cracked windshields constituting the whole of the racers’ damage modelling. Police cars, on the other hand, sustain heavy damage when hit by the player’s car or caused by the player to crash into other cars or obstacles. During races and the game’s Career mode, players can make use of nitrous boosts to help give them an edge against opponents.

Unlike in Underground 2 where nitrous had to be refilled manually by performing stunts and earning style points, nitrous boosts now recharge automatically over time (as long as the car is moving; recharge stops when the car is idling), thus allowing the player to re-use it when needed. Players can use a second ability to help out in tough situations called “Speedbreaker” – when used, the ability slows down time (similar to bullet time), induces drift and momentarily increase the weight of the player’s vehicle to make it harder to be pushed around, thus allowing players to maneuver their vehicle out of a difficult situation.

In the game’s main mode, the objective is to race against each of the setting’s major street racers (or Blacklist Racer) and defeat them. Initially, players begin by completing a tutorial sequence of events to ease players into the game, whereupon they must choose a car to use for the rest of the game. The selection available is limited, but more become available as the player defeats each Blacklist racer, including better performance upgrades for these, with players able to sell series of racing events which earn money rewards when won.

Milestones focus on completing specific objectives, most of which usually involve being involved in a police pursuit and raising the player’s bounty – a form of currency detailing how much trouble the player has caused for the police in the game’s setting, based on the number of offences and damage to property they had caused. An example of a Milestone can be the player being required to enter a police pursuit and then attempting to escape it within a set amount of time. Most Wanted takes place in the fictional city of Rockport, which consists of three major districts: Rosewood, Camden Beach and Downtown Rockport.

The city consists of areas featuring grimy industrial complexes, affluent suburbs, mountainous and wooded surroundings, a university campus, and a downtown core, with a mixture of road networks ranging from coastal roads to major highways. The setting is heavily influenced by cities from across the United States’ “Rust Belt” and Pacific Northwest, with some resemblances to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Much of the game’s events and story take place in a fixed time period between sunrise and sunset, compared to the previous title’s races that took place at night.

 In the city of Rockport, the Rockport Police Department (RPD) work to put an end to the city’s illegal street racing scene. A task force of traffic officers led by Sergeant Jonathan Cross (played by Dean McKenzie) works to bring down any street racers, most prominently including a group known as the “Blacklist”  – fifteen street racers who have gained notoriety for their racing skill and their frequent and hazardous law-breaking driving and capture bounty. The player, a street racer who arrives at Rockport with a custom painted blue and silver BMW M3 GTR, meets fellow street racer Mia Townsend (played by Josie Maran) whilst driving in the southern bridge towards Camden Beach, and races her until Rockport.

There she inexplicably leaves as Cross approaches the player along with his female partner, and narrowly avoids arrest after Cross is called to an ongoing pursuit. The player then randomly finds and races against Ronald “Ronnie” McCrea, who is driving a yellow Toyota Supra A80, and after defeating him, attracts the attention of Ronnie’s boss Clarence “Razor” Callahan (played by Derek Hamilton), the Blacklist’s lowest-ranked driver. He receives help from Mia in setting up a race, with Toru “Bull” Sato, another henchman of Razor, deciding to race the player instead of Razor, who proceeded to call the police to raise the stakes. The player wins, despite police interfering with the race.