New consoles on the market mean a plethora of tried and tested genres, and car racing sims are no exception. Most of you will by now have read Chris's review of the superb Project Gotham Racing 3, but you should note that there's another title vying for pole position. Need For Speed: Most Wanted brings that famous illegal street racing franchise to the Xbox 360, but does it leave the smell of burning rubber in your nostrils or a rather icky spill of diesel?

I launched straight into the story mode and a rather lengthy prologue, which while graphically superb, left my eyes bugging out in wonderment at the incredibly dubious representation of women. To explain, the prologue tells the story of a new boy racer in town. As you drive through a few opening races this pans out to include a run in with the cops, including a head racer cop out to bust all the major players in town.

Next up you meet a rather lovely young woman, Mia, in an incredibly fast car of her own, wearing very little indeed. She introduces you to a 'Blacklister', one of the top fifteen racers in the city who race for pink tickets. If you lose, the opposition takes your car and, more importantly it seems, your credibility. The drivers and his friends all talk to you in an aggressive street patois, which only left me describing them as a word beginning with 'w' and endings 'kers'. Similarly, their girlfriends are all present at the street meets before the race and are skinny, scantily clad, gyrating beauties with chips on their shoulder bigger than the most swollen Maris Piper. These fawning young things really made me wince and certainly cannot be described as role models.

I wondered if the producers were having a laugh, real tongue in cheek stuff, but I have to say this gratuitous display of nubile female flesh made me more inclined to ... ahem… do something else rather than play a racing game. Was this designed with young teenage lads in mind? I think probably so. However, I gritted my teeth, took a cold shower and continued on past the prologue into the meat and bones of the story mode. Thankfully, I found these scenes scarcer the further I went in and the gameplay expanding into something far more involving and enjoyable.

Having lost your car to the Blacklister in the prologue due to his rather nasty sabotage, it's now up to you to start at the bottom of the pile with a normal off-the-shelf car and work your way up the ranks. Your aim is to reach the number one spot on the Blacklist, ousting the enemy and reclaiming your vehicle, but getting there is easier said than done. To even race anyone on the Blacklist you have to earn enough street cred and cash to do up your car, convince the opposition you're a serious rival and even pay off the cops if you get caught.

This is presented in a variety of forms through the gameplay; starting from the Safe House you can choose a few options, either free roaming the city looking for trouble, going head to head with other racers keen to take on the Blacklisters or even taking on the police in destructive hot pursuit romps through urban obstacle courses. During all of these you can earn milestone challenges, such as wrecking a set number of cars, or being caught on camera at ridiculous speeds. These go towards a tally with which you can take on the next Blacklister.

Of these, I found the police encounters by far the most fun and the best place to earn cash, a credible bounty score and milestone challenges. Even once you've outwitted the police, which can take some time, you're free to roam about looking for challenges, more police to outsmart and other things to wreck. Getting the cops off your back isn't easy though, particularly the more notorious you become. The more mayhem you cause, the more squad cars they send after you and the higher up the ranks you get, the more skilled cops and faster rides are sent out to cut you down to size. Some of the most fun ways to stop a cop chase is to drive at high speeds through oncoming traffic or to look out for red triangles on your little GPS radar in the bottom right of your screen. These provide markers that when hit just right cause incredible amounts of damage, which effectively block the police chase. My favourite was when I hit a doughnut shop and caused a massive doughnut from their advertising hoarding to roll down the road!

Taking on the Blacklisters themselves are head-to-head affairs, usually against a much better car. Should you win the events the Blacklister proposes then you get to choose two of six cards. These cards could include upgrades to your own car, get out of jail cards, or other ways to customise, earn money or rep. If you choose a card that has a pink slip attached to it, you also get your competitor's car! This gives you a distinct advantage in future races, as they generally are already heavily modded and you don't need to spend as much of your hard earned cash pushing the performance through the roof, or giving it your favourite colour racing stripes.

All this is a hell of a lot of fun, but don't for a second think this is racing at its most realistic, because it's far from it. Instead, the gameplay has a real arcade feel, from the handling of the car to the amount of damage you can sustain to stay on the road. The car can take hairpin turns at high speeds and still stay upright, as well as drifting in some quite ridiculous fashions. Scraps and scrapes with police cars may crack your windscreen, but otherwise your car maintains it's pristine 'just out of the bodyshop' look throughout. Even head on collisions with other cars aren't disastrous; the worst they'll do is slow you down drastically, giving time for your competitors to speed past or the cops to box you in and book you. This arcade feel appealed to me though, as driving games that take themselves too seriously and have hair trigger controls leave me cold.

It's probably the way the arcade feel transfers to the graphics that makes it seem like a complete and polished package. The producers have steered away from the ultra realistic approach of many racing games and have gone for something deliberately stylised. This is immediately obvious from the prologue, where live action shots are merged with semi-realistic computer generated backgrounds and landscapes, which then merge together further into the start of an actual race. So from where the Blacklister that steals your car spits in your face and shakes his finger at you from his driving seat to the actual pan round to the starting post, it is absolutely seamless. Despite my misgivings about the whole macho posturing and 'woman-as-sexual-object' thing, I couldn't help wish there had been a bit more of this clever visual fusion throughout the rest of the game.

However, that's not to say the rest isn't absolutely beautiful to watch. The cars alone are dreamy gleaming chrome carapaces, polished to perfection and subtly reflecting the environment within which they sit. They're all there too, all the cars you'd probably love to drive if you were a boy racer with a deathwish; all the GT's, the turbo injections, the lowered suspensions, body kits and spoilers. Although it didn't excite me that much, fans of fast cars are going to see all their favourites there, from BMW to Lambourgini, represented in the kind of splendour only a next gen console could accomplish.

The landscapes within which you drive are remarkable given their scope. You quite often quickly go from built up city areas to suburban backstreets to country and forested areas and back again in a completely seamless manner. As you work your way up the Blacklist, more areas are opened up and greater and greater variety awaits you. For all this, the attention to detail doesn't drop and every now and again I had to drop out of the race events just to soak up the scenery. The leaves on the trees are crisp, the cracks in the tarmac have a particular 3D look to them and it's amazing how much character you can put in a run down suburban area.

What really took my breath away though was the ambient lighting and weather effects, which took me completely by surprise. There I was hammering my car down a massive freeway being chased by three cop cruisers and a helicopter, when dusk set in and the sky gradually turned the most beautiful pinky golden hue. This extended to all the surfaces under it and I found this gorgeous sunset reflected in the chrome of the surrounding cop cars. Needless to say, I was so distracted that I got myself busted, such was the visual experience. It almost happened again when I was speeding through driving rain. Besides the drops of rain hitting the camera and sliding down, there is also spray lifted by the wheels of the car and surrounding vehicles, which leaves trails of mist again catching the light in the most remarkable fashion. Although so much thought and work has gone into the landscapes and vehicles, the ambient effects are the glue that hold the whole thing together and make it visually complete.

I was almost as impressed with the sound too, being a barrage of rock and hip hop tunes amid the throaty roar of your rides and the eclectic chatter from the police radio in your car. In fact, this latter kept me very amused whenever a patrol car caught me doing 100 mph the wrong way down a one way street; the voice acting is very good and you can't help but smile at the shock in the police officer's voice as he tries to comprehend what whizzed past him. As the chase progressed, I could practically hear what the cops were thinking from the pointers on the police radio, as they desperately tried to figure out what route I was taking, where to lay the traps and the gasps of disappointment as I slipped through the net yet again. That's when I could hear it over the engine noise and screeching of tyres, mind you, as the higher up the ranks you get and the more powerful your car, the more persistent the sound of the engine. These noises vary considerably from car to car and it's real kudos to the guys behind the audio that the sound of the car engine jogs your memory about which vehicle you've actually chosen to drive.

There's a pretty solid online gameplay section where you can take on up to four people at a time, but this is fairly limited. The exclusion of a pursuit section is particularly galling, but the multiplayer still packs a punch and provides plenty of excitement. Keeping the competitors to a maximum of four reduces lag and there's little juddering of placement to get in the way of high-octane spills. However, once you've had enough of this and you've exhausted the story mode, there's not much to do except take it through once again. Trying different approaches with the cars you drive and how you modify them may be fun for the sports car enthusiast, but I can't imagine it would hold the appeal of the casual racer like me.

As one of the first racing games to be released on the 360 there's a lot to like in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Awesome ambient effects provide the glue for stunning visuals, sound effects almost drown out pumping beats and remarkably adept police chats, while the gameplay challenges are enough to keep you on the edge of your leather upholstered bucket seats. Despite some concerns over the longevity of the title, unless you've already got Project Gotham Racing 3 or are waiting for Burnout: Revenge, there's enough here to keep you entertained for quite a while.

Reviewed by Dave Wynn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).