This unanimously hated remake by Criterion is not that bad, however, it can’t stand before their previous games.
In 2012 Criterion already had 2 racing games on PC under their belts - Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (this was a remake too). Both were fun, oriented on multiplayer, pure arcade bliss, you know. The game where you will stay for one more race until it’s morning again. This game goes into the same direction but somehow gets a few flaws that make the gameplay a little weird.
I want to start from the city. Paradise City was the heart of the eponymous Burnout game: it was big, had many streets, ramified structure, wasn’t even trying to replicate something and, to be honest, was like a monument for the developers - I still remember some streets from it. Ergonomically speaking it usually has more than 1 way to win the race (good sign for the open world racing game that doesn’t show you the route for the first place). Yes, Fairhaven from this game has some similar traits, but it’s much more tight, if this word is applicable for a city. It’s developed with even more emphasis on exploring than Paradise, but feels a little too straightforward. I’ll talk about it a little later.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to begin this with a city. Let’s talk about the first launch of the game. The intro is beautiful, Criterion knows how to make them. You see the panoramic views of the city, there’s a Muse song (side note: a good song. Remember that time when they’ve stopped copying Radiohead and didn’t started copying Queen yet? It was more than decade ago) accompanying what is happening, you think it’ll be a great game. Your first race, you try the new car, you see the leaderboards, you see the cinematic intro for the race, everything seems fine but the first sense of doubt creeps into you in this moment. The cars are spread all over the city. It’s the good idea and it works well here, but it seriously distracts you in the first few hours because you’re trying and trying and trying them all. I’m not going to rant about “who needs slow cars when you’ve got some fastest ones from the beginning”. This is not a problem because game allows to use most of them for a long time. What I want to talk about, is that how this game stimulates you to use one car for a long time. You’ll get the good upgrades soon, some of them will be transformed into the “Pro” versions if you know what you’re doing and every car turns out to be competitive and stays competitive until the last Most Wanted racers from the local Blacklist analogue.
Ok, the “loyalty” system is great, so what’s the next problem? The handling. It just feels somehow wrong, I’d say. The cars are either too heavy or too light and usually can’t hold on the road that well. It doesn’t help that Criterion are using traffic now in the NFS Underground tradition - it usually appears after the blind corner and you literally can’t avoid those cars, they are on your trajectory. And here comes the “Crashed” moments. I’ve called the city tight and here I can explain what it means: in Hot Pursuit the roads were wide and you could easily avoid the traffic. Here it’s just not possible. These “crashed” scenes, they are happening quite often through the entire game and they’re the biggest problem of the game, the biggest fun killers with the car physics. You are crashed into the traffic/wall/cop car/AI has taken you down? There’s your cutscene for a two seconds, now you can go. These 2 seconds are enough to make you stop sometimes. However, this game also the incredible amount of catch-up in races. That’s the part of the reason why cars are staying competitive for a long time. Anyhow, this also means that you’ll be overtaken sometimes in the last corner. Yes, this also means that you can literally go on punctured tyres for the first half of the race and still be close to your rivals on the last checkpoint. I’ve moved to another problem here - checkpoints. This is now a bad feature in racing games in general (some people were asked for it in a Burnout Paradise, you know), but here they’re missable somehow and, I’d want to note, they also showing that the city is too unintuitive and straightforward at the same time. The map is difficult to understand so checkpoints are helping here. About straightforwardness though, it’s not easy to explain. Even if Criterion tried to create some peculiar places, they’re mostly useless. There’s only one way to win and there’s not even much shortcuts or at least the ones that are useful and can’t be missed so easily with these physics.
A little more about the physics. It’s not terrible as is, as I have said before, but it’s not fun to play the game where you have either understeer or oversteer - the drift way to take the corner works very rarely. This is the game that cries to run smoothly. Without good performance it’s harder to be first and by harder I also mean that it’s harder than in other games with these circumstances. Another problem is that it has many jump spots with billboards. It was fun in Burnout, here though not so much, I guess. They have a perfect way to take them and if you’re not going for the way that developers were thinking, sometimes it ends with another freaking “crashed” scene. I appreciated the way that developers wanted to make every car performing a little different (I wanted to see this in Hot Pursuit, but it wasn’t fully implemented there), so at least props for that.
Something interesting now. Criterion outdone themselves here in terms of “art”. The openings for all of the races are weird and this is what makes them unique among boring showoff of the cars in the other games. The Most Wanted list is also pretty cool, I’ve hated the forced badassness of the original. However, I can only judge the new list by the little intros for each car. They’re certainly interesting but I think about them as some futuristic car commercials. Or, as one comment said, a White list. Like it’s a bad thing, you know.
Graphics are great, music is ok, the sound of engines is good.
Something interesting now again. It’s funny to see how Criterion made their own game with their rules when the original MW was probably the closest game from second NFS era to be moved on to Autolog and all those social things. Just look at this: they’ve had challenge series there before (=leaderboards) and there were also blacklist leaderboerds with milestone challenges (pursuit length, cost to state, evaded blocks, evaded spike strips, etc). They could produce even more Autolog leaderboards with the real (hate to use this word here) Most Wanted feeling. But they sticked to what they can do better - billboards and shortcuts. Ok then.
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2.5-3 stars.
The original was overrated as hell, this one is rightly rated, I guess.
