In these early days of the Xbox 360 it's difficult to find a direct comparison to evaluate a game against, so you’ve got to feel sorry for the latest Need For Speed. Not simply because when placed on the starting grid alongside Project Gotham Racing 3 there was always only going to be one winner, but also because PGR3 simply highlights everything that is wrong with EA’s first foray into next-gen racing.

The Need For Speed Most Wanted world of illicit street racing has been around for 10 years. Despite being casually dismissed by many connoisseurs of the genre, the series has been very successful. It’s never tried to pass itself off as any kind of realistic simulation, focusing instead on pure arcade action and thousands of softcore gamers have appreciated just being able to jump behind the wheel of a stunningly shiny car and slide around a few corners. The last outing, Need For Speed Underground 2, was a pretty average racer that some members of the X360 team played through to the end, whereas others dropped it like a bad habit. Regardless, it sold a whole lot of copies and an Xbox 360 upgrade was inevitable. The problem with Most Wanted is that it’s more of an accomplished paint job rather than a complete performance overhaul.

Sitting down with Most Wanted for the first time smothered in the shimmering glow of a high-definition plasma screen, there is certainly something of a wow factor. Not the kind that draws a sharp intake of breath, but one that is instantly appreciative of how dazzling X360 games can look. Need For Speed has always been about bright colours and this is gloriously shiny stuff. The polished details, such as reflections and the real-time lighting and weather effects are excellent. The glare of the sun can be over the top and impair your viewing, and the spray trailing behind other cars on a rainy day is also an impressive nuisance.

However, for all the shine that Most Wanted offers, the gloss soon wears off and those impressive early moments faded when we started to take a more detailed look around. Split across four main locations, again locked off by the same impenetrable clear barriers as in the previous NFS games, there isn’t anything too exciting about the environments you get to cruise around in. Sure, there are a fair few miles to race around but few places have any real personality. Worse still, when rolling along at just a few mph, the lack of sharp textures becomes apparent. Walls and grassy verges have been softened and stretched, creating a blurred look that is fine at 140mph. However, when you see the intricacies that other X360 games have (did we mention PGR3 yet?) Most Wanted begins to look more like a cell-shaded paint job. If it were a current-generation Xbox we’d rate the visuals highly, but while we appreciate that the developer is still getting to grips with the new technology, we’re already expecting a lot more.

Out on the streets, Need For Speed Most Wanted brings the underground racing scene back above ground with the very public presence of the police. Several games, such as LA Rush, have utilised meddling coppers as part of the challenge – a pain to duck and dive your way around, but Most Wanted gets its name because they are an integral feature. From your first race the coppers are on your case, and you need to play them wisely to make progress in the game. Your goal is to get to the top of a 15-man blacklist of street racers. However, winning races and challenges isn’t enough to earn a ride against the big boys – you need to piss off the police to build up your reputation before they consider you worthy. Climbing up the blacklist isn’t as simple as collecting pink slips from beaten boy racers. Instead, each victory awards two markers to spend on six categories. Three are clearly identifiable as parts, performance and visual upgrades, with three other random selections to dabble in. The pink slip is in there somewhere but there are no guarantees that you’ll be able to pull it out and win yourself some new wheels.

Making the best of what you’ve got in the wonderful world of car customisation is still an important part of the Need For Speed experience. It does seem like a toned-down version against the over-the-top modification mentality that you’ll find elsewhere in Forza, but it’s easily accessible and won’t drag you away from the action longer than necessary. Performance upgrades for the engine, transmission and suspension are now solely available as packages rather than individual parts, so you don’t have to pick and choose from a rolling list of manufacturers with insignificant differences. The only finetuning performance options you have are seven sliding gauges to tweak the car to suit your driving style. Again, the fun is to be found in throwing body kits, decals and spray paint at your car and seeing what sticks. There is still some unlocking needed to work through the list of items on offer, but there’s plenty to play with.

The game plays almost exactly like its predecessors, with a free-roaming map (well, free until you hit those locked seethrough barriers) with races, challenges, shops and car lots scattered around. These are marked on a large map and as well as using your GPS to cruise your way to them, you can now jump straight to each meet. There are still several shortcuts scattered around though, so it’s worth spending time exploring each location to find your way around.

The events are very familiar with the traditional circuit, sprint and drag races, but the tedious drift challenges from Underground 2 have thankfully been dropped. A Lap Knockout race has been added (that’ll be the Eliminator mode) and the overwhelming police presence has inspired a Photo Ticket mode where you have to be clocked by a camera at a certain speed or simply faster than your opponents. Pushing the speedometer to the extreme is the ever-faithful supply of nitrous. This time you don’t have to pull off a few cool slides to boost your levels, instead you have a replenishing supply that should keep you in the running.

What you get from taking on a police pursuit is a bounty reward. This will earn you the level of notoriety you need to match your glorious victories and get those blacklist races. Pursuits can be picked up from the Milestone menu, which lists a number of additional challenges from the other racing modes. If you prefer to be a more reckless troublemaker you can instigate a pursuit just by driving like a loon when roaming the streets. Once the police are on your tail, the bounty on your head/car increases, the longer the pursuit lasts and the higher the cost to the authorities. You can, erm, ‘speed’ things up by trashing public property and drawing up a list of driving offences (ironically one of the hardest of these to be charged with is speeding). The more trouble you cause, the more police will enter the chase and the more your bounty increases. As the central feature to the game, these pursuits can become something of a chore after a while, like the minichallenge you can’t be bothered with but have to complete to unlock the next level. The pursuit itself is pretty good stuff, after all, the satisfaction of slamming a police car into a concrete pillar and being rewarded for it is sweet indeed. They’re a pretty smart bunch too, setting up roadblocks, laying down spikes and generally doing a good job (perhaps too good) at busting your pimped-up ass. You are tuned in to their radio frequency though, so you can listen in to the intelligent and accurately detailed conversations going on.

Fair enough, escaping the police shouldn’t be easy, but in Most Wanted it’s simply annoying. You have to stay out of sight for a certain amount of time until the pursuit is called off. However, with such a large environment to roam there are far too few places to hide out until the heat dies down. There are ‘pursuit breakers’ – destructive items such as water towers and toppling buildings to slow the police down, which can add a little creativity into the races. Frustratingly though, your pursuers are too fast to just shake off with a hit of nitrous and just when you think you’ve made a clean getaway, another copper will appear and the timer starts all over again.

What also doesn’t do Most Wanted many favours is that the game actually seems slower than NFSU 2. It’s not exactly pedestrian and the need for speed is well fed with some fast and furious action, but the passion and panache is a little thin on the ground. The cars handle well and stick to the road a lot better, allowing sharper corners to be taken at speed, but sliding around with wheels screeching leaving toasted tyre marks is where the adrenaline is injected. Gripping to the road, the cars slow down anyway and when they do slide it’s without the control that we’d expect.

There is some realism – catch a patch of wet grass and you’ll be slipping around like a newborn deer wearing banana-skin slippers on an ice rink, but it’s still not trigger-clenching stuff. Braking is for squares anyway, right? More so, a complete lack of damage other than an intrusively flapping bonnet takes away any responsibility. There are loads of obstacles to smash through, although a 140mph head-on crash into a concrete wall is only troublesome in that it will leave a nasty scratch on the bumper and you’ll need to waste some nitrous getting quickly back up to speed.

As far as racing games go, Most Wanted is a solid effort with plenty of long-term entertainment on offer and it’s a game that’s hard to put down. However, while it looks good against the current-generation consoles, it is clearly some way off being a great Xbox 360 performer because it doesn’t harness the power and potential that the console’s engine can deliver. Give it a spin and you’ll have some good times, but PGR3 is the clear market leader and not even an eternal supply of nitrous oxide will help this racer keep up.

Ian Collen