NFS Most Wanted 2012: The Good, the Meh and the Ugly
Before I begin, while this game shares its name with its older brother from 2005, aside from the base concept of climbing the ladder these two games have only very little in common and in order to enjoy this game, you must let go of the expectations. If you keep them up, you will not enjoy this game, period. I must say this is only a soft recommend, this game has issues that need to be respected.
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THE GOOD:
Get this on a deep sale, I grabbed it for 2$ and you get some good arcade racing for that if you can get past the initial setup and the Early Game which are the actual problems I will touch on later. For a game from 2012, it looks and plays quite solid imo (I played it on Steam Deck exclusively). The downvotes on this are mostly due to the launcher.
Music slaps I only wish it had a database like the older games in which you could adjust where you want each track to play and disable those you don’t like. Yes I’m a pampered old NFS fan I won’t deny it and I can’t help it.
Not many bugs I have personally run into. You need to discover some really unlucky/obscure scenarios to run into anything major.
The game also doesn’t overstay its welcome, I would almost say it is rather short depending on your skill. The races are tied to the cars and will not become braindead easy even on maxed out cars. Each car has only 5 or so excluding DLC, it never becomes overwhelming. If they are too hard for you there are plenty of ways to get the needed Speed Points, the fastest way is pivoting to other cars and doing the races there.
The performance upgrades are actually varied and come with sacrifices so you can build the same car in a multitude of ways and swap the parts at any time.
The selection of cars is neat, you have your standard array of Exotics but some niche choices as well which might not be as powerful but they’re fun and feed into preferences of specific players like the Oldtimer lovers and Bubble Car enthusiasts.
The Open World is nothing special but I had my fun with it. It’s not as dead as some of the previous NFS games, there is a good amount of traffic and patrolling cops. I like that you have to drive to a race at least once but if you reattempt one later you can skip right to it. There is also a Retry button mid race and you can even restart during pursuit.
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THE MEH:
You have no story in this, and basically every person including yourself is reduced down to their car. This makes it hard to form connections with your vehicle or your rivals. For those who played the old NFS, we remember how Cross scratched up our BMW. Or all the sh*t Razor spit at us. It’s been 20 years and this is burnt vividly into my head. Unfortunately we don’t have that here.
This game throws the cars at you plus you cannot customize them aside from performance upgrades and a Repair Store will always change the color of the car you’re driving. While this useful to escape cops if you like using a particular color for your cars like I do, this will leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Eventually I stopped wasting time to constantly get into the repair shop to cycle into the color I want. You can’t choose the color, you are given one and there is no layered color system where you can manually set one.
Rubber banding goes both ways in this game, it is quite noticeable in general but the AI also have their moments taking turns really badly, getting stuck in some corner or they murder each other in front of you. Ultimately this balances itself out kinda but there will be races you will have to restart simply because you get unlucky with it. I have noticed that achieving takedowns yourself has rather little impact and you are better off racing properly rather than making others crash also because takedowns come at a risk of you downing yourself along with the enemy.
There are definitely moments with hitbox jank regarding takedowns and crashing is not consistent at all, sometimes you will get stuck somewhere and you won’t reset from the impact.
No Steam achievements is a bit disappointing since there are achievements on console so searching for all the billboards, speed cameras and Jackspots feel kinda redundant.
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THE UGLY:
Unfortunately this section is as long as it is, and it’s mostly due to poor testing resulting in questionable game decisions or the launcher itself.
I had no problems setting up the launcher and playing the game the first time around. But when said launcher updated, hell broke loose. The game refused to start and all I could do was to uninstall and reinstall it which fixed the issue. While during my time playing this there was only one such update, the update was small so I bet whenever there is one the game will just break but I cannot say for sure.
The crash cam is infuriating and you cannot turn it off.
Really not a fan of how many checkpoints there are, it slaps one at you every 10 seconds. Some can be missed and it screws you over while others can be missed without any punishment whatsoever. I am okay with checkpoints but some are in really awkward spots like close to shortcuts and the game would be so much better if there were simply less of them.
Many tracks have actively hostile designs with tons of protruding edges to crash into or get stuck on or parts of the tracks are not closed off so you will dart right through, the game won’t reset you, you are just screwed.
Then there top speed bullsh*t with AI in low top speed cars suddenly driving higher TS than they officially can even when maxed. Not just because of rubber banding, you will just have them next to you because of the difficulty level at the start of the race.
The difficulty for races never updates when your car gets better.
The Early Game (arguably the biggest offender) is incredibly hostile towards the player. Without any upgrades on your car the Medium races are rough, without having any game knowledge you will likely struggle to win ANYTHING and you are forced to go around the open world to find a car that suits your playstyle so you can actually progress and cheese your way through with shortcuts or lucky cop escapes to gather a few upgrades and then snowball from there. It does not feel good. It needed one more Easy race to set you up. You have very little options in the beginning despite having access to so many cars. Once it clicks and you get better at the game you are gucci but I cannot deny how frustrating your first 2 hours can be in this game.
That being said, you can explore the open world for two minutes and already find a car that is really busted and not shop-locked. I wish the obviously stronger choices were more tucked away to give the player a bigger incentive to explore.
The next bit affects Steam Deck Users. You need to disable Gyro in your library for this game (Controller icon). Otherwise your car will start to stick drift in a race (not in the open world). You will also need to remap your Nitro as the default configuration sucks up that button completely. I recommend putting it to B. Note that you must unlock Nitro first by winning the one Easy difficulty race of a car.
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OVERALL:
This game sure has its problems but if you like solid, stable arcade racing with a steep learning curve this might be for you especially if you grab this game on a heavy discount. Do not expect story as there is none, this game will feel too soulless to you if you are the type of player putting a lot of weight on immersion and the big Exotic you like is probably locked behind DLC.
Appreciate the game for what it is, not for what it ultimately tried to be and failed. Focus on what it does well. Every game has its frustrating bits just this one has them right away (if not before playing because the launcher may or may not just hate you) . If you give it the chance it deserves and push through you’ll get further than most people and that's already a victory in itself.
