Fancy cars, nice graphics. Unrealistic driving feels. Lots of technical problems.
For gameplay, there are only three major modes you could choose from - Team Escape, Multiplayer race and Single player pursit / race. At first, you'll probably love to feeling of being able to ram the police at your wish, however, the novelty will wear off fast since there aren't much you could do. As for multiplayer race, those players who use lots of real cash will have a pretty big advantage over those who don't. Most of the "Elite" cars and other real-cash cars have very strong "Nitrous" add-on effect, which makes them very hard to beat but that's expected since those cost money. Other than that, the very heavy traffic in game basically makes the racing not enjoyable at all. The players are very likely to ram into all sort of cars so luck plays a very major role in this game, instead of real skill. Furthermore, the driving feel in this game is a bit unrealistic; some cars in this game have very poor performance while in real life, it's a different story. In addition, in a race, majority of the players usually will ram your car into some kind of walls or obstacles; your actual skills won't have great input in this game, and training on counter-ramming is highly recommended.
On the technical side, even after two years, the game is still bug-infested. For example, in a team escape game, the chance of crash-to-desktop is about 25%, that sometimes applies to other type of racing as well. The graphic problems have been well known over the years and EA still unable to fix it somehow. Other than that, when the server is unstable, upon completion of any event, not only you won't be getting any rewards, but also a small chance of weird things happening to your account ( particularly treasure hunt ). There are way too many weird technical problems and those I listed are only the tip of an iceberg. As for the costumer support, most of the costumer representatives are totally incompetent. You're very likely to receive a copy-and-paste standard reply no matter how many tickets you send them, that or they'll probably just give you an answer that has nothing to do with your original question. Honestly, EA really needs to hire some competent employees who can actually read a few sentences.
Despite all those problems, this game still has flashy graphics and the bottom line is it's free to play. The gameplay can be pretty fun if you can manage to drag a few people to play with you. Hopefully, EA will improve the standard of NFSW in the near future.
***EDIT ( Aug 2013 ): After more than a year, EA is still unable to fix majority of the bugs. Crashing is still happening left and right and worse, they can't even fix the chatting system. New players will be put off by this simple, yet essential element to any MMO. Who else would want to play a game with no public chat channel? Any competent company would be able to fix the chat channel in one year but then, it's EA so common sense can't be applied.***