One of my only complaints about Most Wanted was the lack of a proper/better guide through races. I mean, it's good that the circuits have an open design (withouth invisible walls), but the way they made it... was not very intuitive, so I spent the first few hours of the game missing the track and having to restart the whole course.

Second complaint was the lack of story. I mean... it's an arcade racer, but previous Need for Speed titles settled much better background stories that excited you to play and actually gave you a sense of conquering the city. This never happens in Most Wanted.

Other than that, the game is pretty amazing. I actually don't agree with the review; the controls were solid and easy to use... drifting wasn't easy, but that made it very rewarding. I mean, NFS is not as arcade as Burnout or Ridge Racer, so it would be very weird to make crazy drifts like in those games. Anyway, I would give it a good 8.5 myself.

Nintendo should fund an exclusive Ridge Racer.

The first Need for Speed game I played was Underground on Gamecube and that was amazing. Underground 2 was great as well but since then the series has been trending downhill like crazy. I remember writing a review for some Need for Speed game on Xbox360 and I was totally excited to play it... just to realize it was mediocre. That was the day I moved on from the series and never turned back.

Nice review!

Wow they must have really messed up the Wii U port. No wonder 3rd party games don't sell on Nintendo platforms.

Project Zero next plz :) ?

imo it was alright

which one youre talking about?

"Quite regularly the cars don't want to obey. If you want to start a drift early and it doesn't work for some unknown reason, you bump hard into the inside rail/wall; if you are late and it doesn't work, you crash into the outside rail/wall. Conversely, at times your car starts to drift on its own, without hitting the brake or going off the gas."

One of the reasons acceleration and drifting is so difficult in this game is because of the Wii Us lack of analog triggers. I recently got to play this game again on PC because of Origins On The House and its so much better than the Wii U version, it might as well be a different game.

"However, the game uses a less-than-ideal checkpoint system to "guide" you. An intelligent solution for such a racing game would be big colorful glowing arrows that cover up the wrong paths at intersections."

The checkpoints are giant pillars of light in the sky. Its pretty obvious which direction you should be heading. This is the same for Rivals and the 2016 entry so I think its safe to say the system works fine. If not there would have been enough of a backlash to warrant a change. My guess is you just arent that good at navigating, this never even occured a s a poblem to me. Also " big colorful glowing arrows" are so 2005.

"The only real way to salvage this mess of a game is to turn off the traffic. Most issues still remain, but at least it gets bearable. "

Traffic was never much of a problem personally, this will depend on the players dexterity or lack thereof.

"After a few hours of having decent fun comes the realisation that the game lacks variety." 

fair point

Actually I heard good things about this game, and espacily Wii U version.

Yeah, it is a really good port of a messy game. So it's still a messy game imo. I really don't have complaints about the port.