Original creations from major names have been scarce this year, and the final quarter of 2012 is looking little different. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, Halo 4 and others will all be filling Christmas stockings in the foreseeable future.  Big-budget games from the most virile developers.  Need for Speed: Most Wanted by Criterion Games fits the mould well.  The franchise is well established, stretching all the way back to 1994, and delivers precisely what one might expect from the genre:  high-speed racing, brutal crashes, and a handful of miffed traffic wardens.  Nothing revolutionary, then.  This isn’t a criticism – while it won’t be winning prizes for character development, Most Wanted represents the best in a restrictive class.

The first thing to note is the immediacy of the experience.  Without so much as a minute’s introduction you find yourself behind the wheel of an anatomically correct Aston Martin and picking up speed.  The pace of the game is defined in these opening moments.  All major options are accessed on-the-fly from Most Wanted’s EasyDrive menu: races, vehicles, customization and multiplayer are perpetually at your fingertips.  Accessing the system menus is sometimes accompanied by irksome loading, though this is perhaps an artefact of half-hearted porting to PC and not representative of the 360, PS3 and mobile versions also available.  In the same vein, what few cinematic sections there are feel a jarring shift in gear, but this is a minor fault; NFS is fast and relentless.

Criterion wield their lighting engine masterfully – saturated colour and elegant reflections excite the eye and lend vibrancy to a world built on a simple premise.  The audiophile is spoilt too, and those with high-end speakers will find great pleasure in the mighty – and entirely accurate – thrum of 32 different engines.  For the casual listener, the soundtrack presents a powerful assortment of music old and new, including tracks from Muse, Dizzee Rascal and The Who to complement the music of combustion.

One does question the peculiar brand of logic possessed by the police department, however.  Intent on protecting the public from reckless joy-riding, the cops agree that gratuitous ramming is the best way to bring your car to a screeching halt.  What they don’t factor in are the pile-ups they cause by making a bee-line through four lanes of civilian traffic.  With this exception, the AI is largely believable.  Races feel organic and present an enjoyable challenge; frustration comes as a result of player error, not poor design.

There’s a storyline, of sorts, but it knows its place, and rarely deigns to make its presence known.  Caught up in a riotous flurry of hurtling metal, there simply isn’t time to care about the town’s remarkable sports car turnover or who’s going to foot the petrol bill.  Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a finely-tuned game of simple joys.