

There are circuit races, sprints, ones where you have to escape the law, and ones where you have to maintain a high average speed. You get these for doing all sorts of things, like busting through billboards, tearing past speed cameras, getting into chases with the cops, and beating events.Įach car in the game has five events. You earn the right to battle these reining champions by collecting speed points. You see, your goal in Most Wanted is to race and then demolish the ten fastest super cars in town. It's an enormous racing game, after all, with a colossal open world city that can be explored at your leisure. You've got to give Criterion credit for delivering almost the entirety of Most Wanted on a Vita, though. There aren't enough cars on the road to cause gridlock, for example, and the graphics have been scaled down so there are no gates and no dirt. But a few elements got lost in translation. The same route taken through the same city, with the same cars being chased by the same cops. The Vita version is extremely similar, don't get me wrong. Only - I must admit - I was describing the PlayStation 3 version of the game before. A thrilling, white-knuckled orgy of high-speed metallics, as illegal street racers do battle with the cops.

That's a pretty typical race in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I bust through heavy iron gates to take a shortcut through an abandoned hanger, then churn up a cloud of dirt as I skid into the finish line. Every cop car in Fairhaven seems to be on our tail, setting up roadblocks and trading tactics over the police radio. I'm tearing down a busy intersection, weaving in and out of gridlocked traffic, in a head-to-head sprint against a prototype Alfa Romeo.
