Recent reviews by McSmaggler

It's starting to grow on me.
I've nearly made it to tier 7 now.

Wow, where to even start.
First off, I bought this expecting the 2005 game Need for Speed Most Wanted. This abomination is most certainly what I did now want. Sadly, it's not even a remake, just a bizzare choice to name two different games the same thing. At leas Hot Pursuit has like 17 years between the titles. Alas, I wanted to play a racing game and so I persisted, now after 10 hours I feel I can form a solid conclusion.

This game sucks. It tried really hard to incorporate elements of the burnout series by giving bonus NOS for takedowns, drifting and other dangerous driving habits. Sadly, it does not offer enough benefit from doing so to make it worthwhile.

You don't earn cars, you find them. These Jackspots are located randomly through out the city. Theyre not always obvious, and what's worse, in typical EA fashion, the DLC cars are indistinguishable from normal available cars, that is until you click on them and are prompted to origin store. But this means that you unlock $500,000 super cars alongside $35,000 cars. You just sort of choose a care you like and race it.

Speaking of, there's only a few unique races you can do with each car. They all have 1 easy race, 2 medium and 3 hard races. I say hard races, but this varies wildly. Apparently upping the difficulty simply means making the course longer and the police more abundant and homicidal. On an off note, the AI racing oppenents simply cheat. They can crash dozens of times, getting and stuck or spinning 180 degrees. But they'll simply increase acceleration to warp speed and a close a 12 seconds lead in 4 seconds. I've watched this stupid AI crash into a wall out of nowhere. Fall way behind and I pass him doing 160 mph. Only to have him spring out of nowhere doing some 240mph or some nonesense just seconds later. Theres really no difficulty curve as from the start until the end, the enemy AI is just as stupid and yet just as cheap an devious in exploiting whatever NFS allows.

So you would think just upgrade performance aspects. Well, instead of earning money to purchase these.You have to earn them by placing 1st or 2nd in these inidividual races. Placing third gives you nothing but 1st or 2nd unlocks a performance item that can't be earned any other freaking way. So you want them tires? Oh better race this same track again and again and again. Oh you got 2nd? Keep going if you want a car in peek performance. Then theres some lame challanges to unlock pro versions of the upgrades. This is repeated on every single car. Which mean tons of hours of replay value, finding every car, replaying every race until you place first. Driving for an hour in every car to unlock milestones. It's tedious and lazy.

Now, let's talk about the police. They are freaking homicidal. There is absolutely no regard for human life in this game. GTA wants this police force to calm the hell down. There's very little ramp up between the various Heat level as even going 30 mph above the speed limit with quickly warrent you 2-3 cops immediately. God help you if you can't escape in a reasonable time. Because every sign you hit, every scratch you make, they'll be watching you and tallying up the damage. You can easily go from a mild speeding ticket to Osama freaking Bin Laden, as dozens of cop cars disregard life and physics itself with nothing but the soul purpose of capturing you. One of my early games ended with a freaking 43 minute chase. I don't have time or patience to do nothing but run from the freaking cops for 43 freaking minutes. They seem to have some absurd ability to detect you anywhere near by. Not visually or anything, you can be completely concealed and they'll drive a block away, yet still detect and start the chase all over again. Which brings me to my final point. So what if they DO? There's is literally no punishment or deterence that I've discovered. In the original NFS most wanted, once you got arrested in the same car 3 times, it gets impounded and lost. In this game, I've just started getting arrested so i move on with my life.

Coming from starting to play NFS with High Stakes and Hot Pursuit in the 90's, to loving NFS with underground 2, carbon and most wanted in the 2000's, to finding this hot pile of garbage. I'm just truly disappointed at what EA can do to an amazing franchise.

I got this game for free do to a $5 discount on purchases during a sale, And I still feel like I got ripped off.

Rip And Tear.

Fun game, lots of nostalgia at play with this one. Unfortunately the DLC is a waste of money as so few people also own, so on the rare occasion you get into a dlc map, it'll be a 1v1-3v3 at best.

Also the servers are a lawless wasteland of hacking. It's not uncommon to have game after game in different lobbies become unplayable due to people hacking with aim bots or worse. Activion and steam have apparently given up on any resemblence of punishment for cheaters.

I'd recommend it, but only if the customer is aware that this will often be a frustrating experience.