The lovingly crafted, slo-mo crashes that occur when you bust a racer have stayed with me, however, and it’s in touches like this that the Criterion DNA can be seen ripped from their seminal Burnout franchise. With weapons like spike strips that are dropped behind the car, causing following cars to spin out, and roadblocks that the police can call in, it’s almost like a grown-up, real-world version of Mario Kart. As the racer/cop levels increase, not only do new cars become available – starting out slow with a Porsche Cayman, for instance – but whilst working up to Pagani and Koenigsegg options we could also unlock new weapons for our whips. However, the story was almost completely absent, replaced with a level mechanic that saw us either being a Racer or a Cop, with parallel game careers to play.Īs a racer, the focus is either on winning races or escaping from the police, while as a cop we are charged with ending races by wiping out the racer’s cars, or screaming across the country in an attempt to get the car into a roadblock in time. This game was graphically awesome, with a speed and fluidity to the driving that was breathtaking at the time.

The exact opposite could be said of the second game, Hot Pursuit, from the year 2010. Once the choppers appeared, that was the time to start putting the pedal to the metal.

The difficulty I had though, especially in the faster cars, was keeping a chase going long enough to rack the heat up, as the first few levels could be easily outrun in my fave Lambo, and I would constantly have to remind myself to slow down. The police chases were always a high point, and they could be started by sitting outside a police station, doing burnouts – something that was endlessly amusing. The journey from fresh-out-of-prison jail scum to top of the Blacklist was certainly a tough one, and with each member of the Blacklist having a series of challenges to be met before they could be challenged, Most Wanted came with a hell of a lot of content. Anyways, the story was a bit of humdinger, featuring double crosses, undercover police, car sabotage and a culmination that saw us having to flee the city by flying across a derelict bridge in an ending that was as memorable as it was difficult to pull off, with everything the police had at their disposal seemingly thrown at you.

Need for speed wanted xbox one