Need for Speed: Most Wanted – First 16 Minutes and Impressions

It’s October 30, 2012 and you know what that means? Tons of new games! Here we have Criterion’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted. As a fan of the Burnout series, I knew I had to have this when I heard that it was essentially Burnout Paradise 2 with licensed cars. The good thing is it lives up to those expectations…for the most part. Check us out after the jump for the first 16 minutes of Need for Speed: Most Wanted as well as my first impressions.

While it does live up to my expectations, there are two irritating things that I’ve encountered in my short playtime with Most Wanted. For one, the user interface is far too cluttered, when you get a takedown a big image displaying how much SP, speed points, you earned for that particular action covers up precious real estate above your car. In some situations, this could be the difference between beating your friends’ time, or getting that new part you’ve been wanting.

Which brings us to the second thing, and probably the worst part about Most Wanted: the customization. Need for Speed: Most Wanted takes a new approach to customizing your car. Gone is the traditional method where you would fine tune your car before a race. Now, you’re able to equip different parts ranging from chasis, to nitros, or even tires, to gain the upper hand on your fellow racers. While in practice, this doesn’t sound too bad, the execution leaves something to be desired.

This is all handled through the game’s “Autolog” system which allows you to quickly access a variety of options with a few clicks of the D-pad. It’s hard. Say you want to switch from your standard tired to off-road tires so you don’t slow down while taking a shortcut during a race. Your left thumb (or whatever you use to steer) has to leave the left-analog stick and quickly change tires before you collide with the quickly-approaching wall in front of you. For Xbox 360 users, this isn’t so much of a problem since Most Wanted supports voice commands with Kinect, otherwise it would have been nice if the steering was mapped to the right-analog stick while you’re in analog, so you still have control over your steering. Otherwise, everything about this game is just about perfect, but I’m only 30 minutes into it so far, so you’ll have to wait for our the review for my final verdict.  .Check the video for the first ten minutes of the PSN copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the PS3.