Need For Speed Most Wanted Member Review for the Xbox360

The Good: Decent graphics, nice weather effects, bounty system is well implemented, lots of customization options, you don't have to roam the world, fun mulitplayer, live action cut scenes are surprisingly good

The Bad: Graphics could have been better, bug crashes and framerate hitches abound, no downloadable content whatsoever, weird control setup, no drifting, the world of NFS is boring

Two NFS games later Most Wanted is still fun and exciting. This is probably the first NFS that did new things since Underground 1. The big thing here is the Bounty system and the Blacklist system. You start out at the top and then a racer named Razor cheats and gets your pink slip dropping back to the bottom of the well. You have to climb to the top of a list of 15 different racers to have a crack at Razor again. To get to each racer you have to raise your bounty a certain amount and complete a certain amount of races. There are many race types here, surprisingly, and they are fun and keep things mixed up. You have anything from drag racing, to speed traps (which clocks the fastest racer), toll booth (timed checkpoints), to regular circuits. The bounty system is really nice and fun since you have to run from the cops and as you smash into them and evade them your bounty increases. You can use Pursuit Breakers to get the cops off of you then you can find various hiding spots until your heat cools down. This in turn brings the heat up on your car and the higher the heat is the more likely you'll get spotted. The next thing is the big free roaming world which you, honestly, really won't want to roam much since it feels so empty and boring. Thankfully EA put a jump to safe house option and you can get to races from a menu instead of driving there if you want. The tuning is really nice here as well and doesn't boggle your mind like Gran Turismo would. There are a plethora of parts, visuals upgrades etc. to choose from. The main gripes here is that this is a typical EA port and they left in some bugs such as framerate hitches and crashes, but they never came out with a patch to fix this issue. The multiplayer is a nice setup but that's all you'll come back for after you beat the single player. If you missed this NFS or are new to it this isn't a bad entry point.