Vita: Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012) Review

If I recall correctly, this was the second game I started after picking up my Vita back in October.

I can boil down my thoughts on this game as such: great port, meh game.

A Great Port

It's a full open world racer, has very good graphical fidelity for the thing it's running on, maintains a decent enough framerate, and all the rest. I'll put a screenshot below, and while it may not look particularly appealing in this format, it looks a lot nicer in person.

an in-game screenshot

I think it's still pretty impressive, even today.

Especially in a world full of shoddy Vita ports, this one definitely stands out as one of the better ones.

If you want to nitpick, then yes, the framerate does get a bit choppy at times, but it's not that big of a deal. Resolution can get pretty low too, but again, no big deal. 100% net positive with regard to the quality of the port.

A Meh Game

Okay so I have some pretty sizable gripes with this game. I'm definitely not the first to notice these, but I'll go ahead anyway. They boil down to two things:

  1. Repetitive gameplay loop
  2. Controls/handling

Repetitive gameplay loop

This game gets seriously repetitive. Seriously repetitive. The gameplay loop is designed as such: you explore the open world, discover the locations of cars and level them up. There's no buying cars or upgrading them here, which I don't mind. The issue is, whenever you find a vehicle, you have to go through 6 races each time, of which so many are recycled between cars. It feels a bit like if you do one race in one car, you'll probably do the same race in every other car in the game.

Then consider there are somewhere around 50 cars in the game total. Repeat this same loop for every car if you want to max them out.

The good news is that this isn't required to beat the main campaign (if you will, not that there is much of one). There are about 10 races as part of this campaign, which you beat in order to get a few special cars.

Controls/handling

Vehical handling here is extremely ambiguous. At one moment, you'll steer your car fully in one direction and it won't turn, the next you'll oversteer yourself to oblivion. Engaging a drift here is done through brake-to-drift, but it's never particularly reliable.

I'm not sure how to put it, it's like cars have infinite grip and downforce, which, mind you, is typical of arcade racers, but the handling doesn't work when you want it to.

Conclusion

Still a net positive game, all things considered, and I say that given that I have put about 14 hours into it.

I wouldn't say it's particularly worth it on modern platforms, but on something like a Vita, no harm done.

This article was written on 22/05/2024. If you have any thoughts, feel free to send me an email with them. Have a nice day!