Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012)

Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012) was a racing game released in 2012 and it was a sort of remake of the original Need for Speed Most Wanted that was released in 2005. The original reception for this game was that it was nominated for several awards. Only god knows how that happened since this was truly a hollow experience. Comparing to the the original Most Wanted, or any Need for Speed game from the playstation 2 era, or even some later Need for Speed games that I've played, this never Most Wanted game had nothing going for it. 

Gameplay

Starting from the top which wasn't the worst thing about the game but surely was not good, is the gameplay. It is very similar to the "newer" Need for Speed games but even bad compared to those when looking at the driving mechanics. The bad thing about the newer games when it comes to driving is that even a small pebble on the road will cause you to crash, this will result in a slowmo crashing sequence that takes a lot of time. Compared to the older ones, if you crash, you lose speed or at worst, spin out and you have to just accelerate again but you can still play. In this one if you are unlucky and you crash a lot, you are essentially just watching you car spin around MOST of the game, instead of driving it. But that's just driving and it's still the one of the best parts of the game.

When it comes to other parts of the game, the game felt like it was stripped naked and left like that. Compared to earlier Need for Speed games you had plenty of races, you had car dealerships, you had your own garage and a car tuning garage or both of them combined but a garage none the less, you had money to manage for buying and upgrading cars. You had an actual story to the game. In this new one all of that is taken away. All you have is a small menu where you can upgrade car or choose another car to go and collect from somewhere in the map, you have a limited amount of races and those races you more or less have to drive again on each new car when you want to get upgrades for it or earn "speed points". Mind you, speed points aren't currency, they are what used to be the bounty in the better Most Wanted game. So basically everything we had in the previous Most Wanted or most previous Need for Speed games are just taken away. The most basic components of a video game are just stripped and nothing added to replace. Even the story is nonexistent. (more on that later) 

And you can always argue that maybe this was meant to be a simulator and not an actual game. Well then if we ignore the fact that the game is called "Need for Speed" a game series that has never been a simulator, then even then it wouldn't be a good game. Remember previously when I said that even driving isn't that good? Well that is the main point of a simulator, a realistic driving, and you don't get that here, you get absolutely nothing. 

Story

Remember back in the playstation 2 era when you had those real life actors playing in proper cutscenes? Well that's no longer a thing. All you have here is a flyover of the city and a narrator saying "your goal is to be the most wanted and you do that by earning speed points and taking down races" or something like that. That's basically the story. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Basic idea behind this paragraph is to say that there isn't one. All the story you get is the title of the game. What else would you need to get from a game that historically has had some beautiful stories within a racing game?

AI

This part is here because the AI seemed off but I don't know if it has always worked like this. It feels like in the older games, if you played well, you could pull off a huge lead and then if you stumbled at some point, you could use that lead to still stay ahead. The system was fair, or at least it felt like it. Compare it to this steaming pile, where the AI usually always stays close. if you screw up a lot, they won't drive too far away, great, easy to catch up again so you don't have to restart. The problem is that it works the other way too, if you drive really well the entire race they will always be on your tail. The problem that his kind of "AI" brings is that it doesn't matter how well you drive most of the race, all you have to do is not screw up in the last quarter of the race or so. Driving well most of the race isn't rewarded and driving poorly most of the race isn't punished, just don't screw up before the finish line. That, to me, does not seem fair. 

Open World

There's not much to say about this, it's a very traditional open world for a Need for Speed game. Of course it is a newer game than the original Most Wanted and other games from that era so the world is much more detailed. But for some reason the world still felt kinda small. I'm not sure if it was, but it felt like it. Not much bad to say about that one. 

This game really was a steaming pile of dung. Even the fact that they named it the same as a previous game and were most likely trying to cash in some nostalgia points couldn't save this game. It was so bad that it did not feel like a Most Wanted game, barely even like a Need for Speed game and thus the low low score of 3/10