A solid game that could be better with more variety. If racing games are fun to you, don't hesitate to buy NFS MW!
GRAPHICS:
By the moment you start playing, you'll notice the game has very good graphics (Buildings and road aren't as impressive as the cars but they do the job) and the game runs very fluid. Light effects and Day/Night cycles are awesome, they really add to the visual presentation. In a complete package you get to race in a beautiful, varied city.
The resolution of the game doesn't seem to be correct, and you can notice if you stop your car and look closely (borders look blurry and jaggy). Civilian cars look good enough but their lights look very pixelated, there's just the correct amount of them rolling in the city, it is not as drastic as some say.
One aspect I see lots of people complain about is the size of the letters... To be honest, it wasn't a problem for me. The size is small but readable. The worst thing for me is that this is one of those VITA games which have that "brightness lock" where you can turn up the brightness more than 80% or so. WHY?! It is not a huge difference but things would look more vibrant with brightness at 100%.
SOUND:
Sound department is top notch, all cars sound different, cities sound like cities and soundtrack is fairly good with tracks featuring Muse, Skrillex and more mediocre stuff. The good thing is that you can use the VITA music player when playing the game so you can hear something different whenever you like.
A nice touch is the dynamic effects applied to the sound, for example, if you go into a tunnel, music, wheels and motor sound different as if you really were passing through a tunnel.
Not everything is laughs and happiness tough... Police chattering is beyond stupid. They report to the central everything you do with cheesy BS and it becomes a chore to hear after 2 hours of gameplay.
As a random fact, if you don't push any button in a certain amount of time, the annoying music will stop, a beautiful tune will start playing and you'll get to see your current position in the Most Wanted list while the camera flies around the city. :B
GAMEPLAY:
Racing is all you do in NFS MW, and surely it is fun! Controls are not mappable which is a shame but the defaults are OK. Cars are responsive, some require a lot of skill to control like the Ariel Atom 500 V8.
In earlier reviews some people reported incredible amounts of lag and bugs.
It goes without saying that yes, there are some bugs but at the time I bought the game, EA released some patches and the experience is fluid and you can rarely encounter a bug that spoils the experience.
I like to refer to this game as the Pokémon of racing. You don't earn money to buy cars, you don't need to do special missions to obtain them neither (with the exception of the Most Wanted cars). You have to find them! They are all over the place. The game has around 41 different cars, ranging from the Challenger SRT8 to exotics like Lamborghini Aventador. Some of this cars have to be taken out from the hands of their owners after defeating them in a race.
Customization is very bland, you can only change the car to another random one by passing through special places, apart from that there's anything to change the appeal of your car. For me this wasn't a problem tough, as i like to keep my cars elegant and simple, but I heard that for some others this was a deal-breaker since the game wouldn't let them to apply skull stickers and pink windows to their Aston Martin Vantage. :B
Completing races and challenges give you points which stack up and unlock new races. As I said earlier, you don't earn money, so you'll have to win races with specific cars in order to unlock new upgrades like lighter bodies, nitro systems and better wheels. At the end you could have a Subaru Impreza that is faster than a stock Bentley. This is the thing that will keep you busy since there's no story whatsoever other than that... there's really not much to do in the enormous city.
MULTIPLAYER:
The game has a "always connected" option which is not bad at all. While playing the single player mode, if you are connected to the internet, you can check your friends milestones and better times in the real place where it happened. So if you go past a speed radar, you can see at what speed your friends past trough. The one who went faster gets to put his/her PSN avatar in the radar, billboard etc, so you'll have constant challenges to beat!
The multiplayer mode connects you with 3 other people in a free roam mode so you can run in the whole map! You can set " custom playlists" of races and other challenges. The one who gets the best score overall wins the round and gets to choose another playlist and so on. The problem is that the game runs slower and it tends to lag a lot even when you are 1ft away from your router.
CONCLUSION:
At this date this is the best racing game I've played on the VITA. the production value is very high, there are a good amount of cars and it will keep you busy for a long time. It's incredible to see the PS3 game is basically untouched in the VITA version. It's just matter of time for VITA games to become better and better!
If you have the opportunity to get this game, DO IT! It is awesome.