Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Review

22 Nov 2010 at 15:38:32 by John Robertson
Systems used to review this title: (360)

Criterion sure know how to make an arcade racer.  With Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit the Guildford based studio is now responsible for providing us the two finest examples of the genre this generation of hardware has to offer.

If you had already written off the NFS series as one suffering from a Lady Gaga grade crisis of identity, the like of which it had no chance of recovery, then you’re going to need to think again.  This is a polished, focused, exciting game from a studio clearly relishing the opportunity to turn one of gaming’s biggest franchises into a world beater once again.

The way they’ve gone about achieving such a turnaround is by putting it reverse and going back to square one.  Hot Pursuit is about cops versus racers, it’s about driving fast and it’s about looking good doing it; just how it was when NFS first crashed onto our screens in the mid-90s.

Looking good while doing it is fairly easy to achieve - everything in Hot Pursuit looks absolutely, almost unbelievably, gorgeous -  the chunky, shiny car models, the beautifully rendered backdrops of the imaginary Seacrest County and the blurred road markings when travelling at high speed combining to create a visual feast par excellence.  What’s perhaps most impressive is that, despite the electrifying pace you’re setting across the tarmac, the frame rate never drops, the game’s engine never even hinting that it’s under any strain whatsoever.

That lack of strain stands in stark contrast to the engines you find yourself behind the wheel of, which, due to the Autolog system, you’ll be pushing to their limit at every opportunity.  As its name suggests Autolog automatically logs the times you and your friends set on each event, posting them to a communal wall for you to rank yourselves against one another.  At the start of each event the Autolog will display a time set by one of your friends as a recommendation for you to try and beat. 

It’s a simple but incredibly powerful tool that makes every race important, the desire to beat your friends adding real weight to your actions and spurring you on to retry events until you’ve truly mastered them – not only to beat your friend’s times but to make sure they’ve got as little chance as possible of beating your own.  I lost count of the number of times I’ve restarted races, despite being comfortably ahead of my CPU opponents, simply in a bid to top the Autolog table.

In much the same way as you would on Facebook, Autolog also allows you to post messages to an in-game ‘wall’.  Upon beating a friend’s time the game generates a default message detailing your accomplishment which you can then share with the world however, the real  fun comes in altering it and adding a little spice in the form of some brilliantly low-brow trash talking.  Any photos you can take can also be shared in the same space allowing you and your friends to comment on each other’s artistic ability (or lack thereof).

Career events are split into two categories, those in which you play a street racer and those in which you’re a cop, with levelling up and vehicle unlocks exclusive to each; in a sense playing like two separate careers rolled into one game.  As you may expect, your primary objective as a racer is to compete in (and win) illegal street races and time trials across Seacrest County while your goal as a cop is to shut down such events.  It’s hardly a ground-breaking structure but it does a decent job in throwing up enough variety and, with the Autolog thrown in, will keep you satisfied for a long while. 

The world of Seacrest County in which these events take place manages to incorporate all the locations you’d expect from an arcade racer.  You’ll find yourself racing down long, wide highways, through dusty deserts and around sweeping, Fujimi Kaido inspired mountain roads.  Unlike Burnout Paradise, Hot Pursuit is not an open world racer (although the option exists to ‘freeride’ around the environment) instead you select events in a more traditional manner from various starting points from a world map. 

The game benefits from such a system for two reasons.  Firstly, it allows you to jump in and out of the short, sharp races quickly and easily without worrying about returning to a certain location to retry an event.  Secondly, much of the excitement (at least as a racer) comes from the intense competition between you and the other racers as you attempt to cross the finishing line first (the best tactic often being to sabotage your competitors by running them off the road and right into the heads of the chasing police) this competition just wouldn’t exist when driving around looking for the next event.

In your bid to best the competition you’ve got a few tricks up your exhaust: an EMP that disrupts your opponent’s vehicle and causes them to lose control for a moment, spike strips that puncture their tyres and a jammer that blocks their mini-map and removes their ability to use any weapons themselves for a short time.  The police also have road-blocks and a support helicopter to call in. 

A turbo boost and nitrous system that builds up for driving into oncoming traffic, taking shortcuts, performing drifts and narrowly avoiding other vehicles round off your arsenal nicely and provide a nice mix of options for besting the rest of the pack.  Still, the tried and tested tactic of simply smashing into your opponents as hard as possible often trumps the more high-tech options at your disposal.

Combine this simple, engaging gameplay with the lush visuals and you’ve got a game that ticks all the right boxes while adding a few that simply doesn’t exist before but, in the case of Autolog, are sure to become well used features moving forward; not just in racing games but across the spectrum of online enabled videogames.  There are also a number of online modes to dive into, the 4v4 ‘Hot Pursuit’ providing the most fun as a group of racers compete to cross the line first with the cops attempting to wreck them out of the race – only if all four racers are ‘Busted’ does it count as victory for the Seacrest lawmen. 

There are a couple of little niggles that attempt to spoil the party though, loading times are too long in single player considering how likely it is you’re going to be restarting events in a bid to beat your friend’s Autolog times and things can sometimes get a little dull when participating in contests that don’t involve both cops and racers (time trials, test drives and the like).

Despite those minor flaws Hot Pursuit is arguably the best the arcade racer you can buy right now and, as mentioned at the start of this review, if it’s not number one then it’s certainly number two.  Credit must go to Criterion for managing not only to reinvigorate a struggling franchise but for making it more special than it’s ever been.  Once again, after so many disappointments, we’ve got the Need for Speed, we’ve got it bad.

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