More Need for Speed Most Wanted details arrive along with 5mins of gameplay

In Most Wanted, the entire city of Fairhaven is open from the beginning. Find a car, and it's yours to cause mayhem in.

We recently presented a snippet of gameplay from Most Wanted that will hopefully explain a little about what we mean when we say that freedom, friends and competition are at the heart of the Most Wanted experience.

The video kicks off with our player in the Aston Martin V12 Vantage. The Vantage is refined, elegant and sophisticated: a gentleman among exotics.

But this is not the stock Vantage. This is the V12 - a 510 horsepower monster that’ll do 0-62 in 4.2 seconds and hit 190 mph in a straight line. It’s Bond on steroids.

The sequence starts with the player taking the car for a quick spin through our open world city of Fairhaven. You can cruise around, hit jumps, explore buildings, rip past speed cameras. You can pretty much drive anywhere.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice cars parked all over town. We’re tired of playing a game for hours to unlock our favourite car, so we’ve placed almost all the cars in the game throughout the open world. If you can see it, you can drive it. Drive over to any car and “jack” it.

And in this instance, we’ve stumbled across Mercedes-Benz’ incredible SL 65 AMG Black Series. Each car has a unique set of events for you to play. You can tackle them in any order, but you might want to check their difficulty in Autolog before taking them on. Some events will seriously test you in an unmodified car.

Earn Speed Points by playing any part of the game (single-player or multiplayer) to rank up, move up the Most Wanted list and unlock Modifications for your car, that will help you beat our most challenging events.

When you’re ready to play, you can either jump to a event start or set a waypoint. This gives you a chance to explore the city or road-test modifications as you go. You can see the Mercedes' modifcations listed to the right of the screen, when you select the car.

As the race plays out, you'll see how Autolog transforms your open world driving experience in Most Wanted. Autolog puts your friends at the heart of the game.

Check out your friends' records at the start of any event on the "Speedwall" - a leaderboard for every event.

Fairhaven City is full of speed cameras. Rip past any camera, and Autolog displays your friends’ highest recorded speeds through that camera. Just playing races will record fast times, but you can also visit any camera in open play to session it, testing for the fastest route, the fastest car and the fastest Modifcation package for that location.

Every billlboard in Fairhaven City has a Speedwall. Autolog displays it to the left of your screen, whenever you drive close to one. You can see your friends' record jump distances for each and every billboard jump in the game.

Hit the ramp, smash through the billboard and record the longest distance jumped of your friends to reach the top of the Speedwall.

Getting to the top of any Billlboard Speedwall will replace the picture on the billboard with your profile picture. When your friends play the game, they’ll have to put up with your ugly mug beaming down at them and gloating over your fast times.

Whether you're playing an online race, losing the cops in an epic chase or just exploring the streets, Autolog is watching, recording and broadcasting to your friends. And bringing your friends' records back to you.

So its a Burnout game then....unless the licencing of real world vehicles is already contractually tied to the NFS name then there is no reason not to rename this as Burnout.

Looks pretty tight though. Just depends now on the vehicle handling - I love Burnout for the outrageous arcade handling and the sheer sense of speed - that SLK whilst doing 160 still didnt seem to convey that sensation of speed as Burnout does.

i want this looks great but like you say needs to be more on the arcade side of gameplay

I'm not to worried about the handling model, if there's one thing Criterion always get right its satisfying handling