There are plenty of cars to win or purchase, depending on how lucky you are. When you play against a blacklist competitor and win, you can earn tokens. Some tokens are for various performance upgrades and othrs are random. Always go for the random tokens, because if you’re lucky you can win your opponents car for free! Each car has it’s own physics. No two cars drive alike. It’s all about finding a car that you can work with and winning.

You can tweak your car in the garage and give it additional performance upgrades. You can also give your car a new paint job, which cuts down the police’s bounty on you. (Shades of GTA here).

You will rack up a lot of play time in the career mode, but that’s not all there is in the game. You also have split-screen racing and racing over Xbox Live. There are also challenges in the game that give you a set of goals to accomplish.

After all these raves, what are the drawbacks? Well, quite frankly, this game screams for a split screen and Xbox live Cops vs Street Racers mode. If this were here, I would be in heaven. Other annoyances include having to tell the system every time that you want to load a profile from the hard drive (hello! I have the premium and no memory card! Where else am I going to load a profile?) and the game taking some time to really give you a challenge on the police modes and on the Blacklist. The game ramps up from insanely easy to moderately hard pretty quick, so be prepared. Finally, at the time of this review, there are no steering wheels to be had for the Xbox 360. I am hoping that Mad Catz’ new wheel comes out very soon in order to fully enjoy this game with a wheel.

Regardless of what platform you purchase Need For Speed: Most Wanted, you’ll have a good game to play. The Xbox 360 makes NFS: MW an even better game and it should absolutely, positively be one of your first titles with the console. Even if you already have the game on the original Xbox, I highly recommend upgrading.