Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005) is the best game ever in the Need For Speed series

The 2000’s were the golden years of racing games with two of the best franchises releasing masterclasses after masterclasses. You had Nadeo releasing Trackmania Sunrise, Stadium und United Forever, and EA releasing Need For Speed: Underground 1 und 2. My point is, the standards for a good racing game at the time were crazy high and in 2005, EA released Need For Speed: Most Wanted, a Need For Speed that will never be topped. Here’s why.

The pursuits with the cops were absolutely amazing

I loved everything about the pursuits in this game. The small camera focus on the cop car when you got spotted, the SUVs randomly trying to murder you by going full speed towards you, the way your car was much more powerful and you could send cars flying if you hit them right and also the traps you could hit or go trough to destroy multiple cars at once. The longer it went and the harder it got, it was unrealistic, but the second the need for speed games started making cop pursuits realistic is when I stopped enjoying them.

The story

The story wasn’t anything special, but that’s never the case with Need For Speed games. What was great about the story was the black list. Rising through the ranks and challenging black list members for their spot on the list was awesome, you even had the option to take their car after you win. The end goal was getting your car back, that the villain, Razor, took from you when he rigged a race by sabotaging said car at the beginning of the game. The only way to do that was obviously to beat him in a race after you beat every other member of the black list. After winning the race Razor rats you out and you need to escape the city. The last pursuit you have is a level 6 pursuit, which you only get at this point in the game and it adds to the intensity of the situation, it ends with you doing an amazing jump that the 60 other cops didn’t have the balls to do, and since helicopters weren’t a thing then apparently, you are free and this is the end of the game.

After that the quality of Need For Speed games slowly but surely dipped

The following games never came close to being as good as Most Wanted was, altough some were pretty good, like Carbon for example. They released another Most Wanted in 2012, which was an absolute disaster of a game and nowadays I ask myself how Need For Speed games are still profitable for EA, because for me it’s clear that I wouldn’t touch a Need For Speed game that has come out in the last 10 years with a 10 foot pole unless I got it for free. This obviously adds value to Most Wanted because it is one of the last Need For Speed games that were any good. Thank you for reading.