It’s also remarkably short, omits car customization entirely and incorporates AI rubber banding to a degree that puts Mario Kart's to shame (an impressive feat, we must admit). Most Wanted 2012 has, well, none of that. That game had a world teeming with exciting moments, furnished with endless, fun events and a physics engine that encouraged a will to discover. And while there's some merit to that assessment, it's also pretty unfair to Paradise. Carbon, conversely, has aged into one dark, murky blur.Ĭertainly one of the most polarizing entries in the series, Criterion's Most Wanted is typically remembered by those who played it as Burnout Paradise with licensed cars.

All these years later, I can still remember my favorite cooldown spots and stretches of road in Most Wanted. The perpetual night setting certainly doesn't do Carbon any favors, nor does its personality-less metropolitan map that holds few, if any, memorable features. However, the more you play it, the more you realize it somehow also fails to recognize what made Most Wanted a fan favorite to begin with. NFS: Carbon (2006)Īt the outset, Carbon doesn't do a whole lot to distance itself from Most Wanted before it. Instead, it added yet another notch to the franchise's long list of failed reboots. Thematically, 2015 had the conviction to redefine Need for Speed for an exciting new era. Yet, it’s all mercilessly undone, beaten and torn beyond recognition by the least intuitive handling model ever to grace a triple-A racing game.

NFS 2015 had everything going for it: a clear vision, phenomenal visuals for the time and the most powerful customization engine the series had seen up to that point. Not since Capcom's Auto Modellista has a racing game so perfectly captured a flavor of car culture fans had been yearning for, yet been so inexplicably dreadful to play.

Need for speed game pc