Game Review

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

I like the Need For Speed games. The original Most Wanted is one of my favourite driving games, as I feel it struck the right balance between arcade racing and more technical driving as in the Colin McRae games. Plus, the police chases were brilliant fun. Another driving series I like is Burnout, with its spectacular crashes and aggressive racing that lets you bully your way to the finish line. So when I heard that Criterion, the developers of Burnout, were on board to make Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, and that it would bring back the police chases, I was more than a little excited. I dreamed of a game that would fuse aggression with finesse, madness with focus. And I got it… sort of.

The single player game is split into two concurrent careers, neither of which has any real attempt at a story. You can either be a cop or a racer, each having vehicles and events designed for their purposes. Racer events are what you’d expect, with races, time trials, one-on-one duels, hot pursuits and gauntlets, the last two respectively being races and time trials with police pursuit. Cop events pit you against speeders and reckless drivers, with interceptions that have you hunting down a single driver on the open roads, rapid responses—the cop equivalent of time trials—and hot pursuits, which have you trying to shut down every racer before they reach the finish line.

Hot pursuits are, unsurprisingly, where this game shines. Whether attacking or defending, you’re kitted out with a variety of car-mounted tools to bring down the opposition. Both cops and racers can deploy spike strips and EMPs to damage each other, and while racers have a more defensive loadout with weapon jammers and turbo boosts, cops double up the power with road blocks and helicopters to damage and slow racers far ahead. It’s savage, reckless and strategic all in one, and feels like the natural evolution of Burnout’s road rage events.

Each career has five classes of events and five corresponding classes of vehicles. With a few exceptions, car choice is identical in both careers, with police cars bearing unique paint jobs and supposedly having slightly greater speed and acceleration. It’s kind of ridiculous driving a Lamborghini Gallardo with POLIZIA emblazoned on the side, but wondering where the police got this kind of funding only gets in the way of the fun.

All events take place in the Seacrest County area, not unlike Burnout Paradise’s Paradise City. One key difference in setting is that for most events your route will be cordoned off by walls of arrows, so you don’t have to worry about navigating. That said, there are many so-called shortcuts in the county, so-called because the game actually tells you that some of them take longer than staying on the road. Add to that the fact that most shortcuts are off road, and low-slung exotics—the only cars you’ll be driving by about halfway through the game—lose a lot of speed off road, taking shortcuts is rarely worth the effort.

On the face of it, NFS: Hot Pursuit looks to be every bit the racer I imagined. However, the devil is in the details. While challenging games are fun, punishing games are considerably less so. After a collective fifteen hours of play, I still haven’t got the hang of drifting. Controls feel twitchy and have varying degrees of responsiveness, which often results in oversteer, understeer, or the car slamming into a wall or traffic when you only wanted to change lanes. I might take a corner perfectly once and then screw it up the next ten times, without any idea of what I’m doing wrong. Every car seems to handle very slightly differently, and you don’t spend enough time with any one of them to really adjust to its unique balance.

Handling aside, other parts of the game reward you for doing well, and kick you in the gut for every mistake. While slipstream—driving closely behind another driver—is a great way to boost acceleration and therefore give everyone below first place a chance to catch up, if you fall too far behind it becomes very difficult to close the gap. Why do the Cop time trials add extra seconds as penalties for bumping walls and traffic? You already lose speed and therefore time by running into things, so why pile on? Sometimes NFS: Hot Pursuit feels like the Dark Souls of racing, and only the most hardcore drivers would say that’s a good thing.

On the other hand, some events get significantly easier once you unlock the Bugatti Veyron, as this car is easily 20mph faster than anything else in the game. It’s not exactly a cheap win as there’s usually an AI racer or two driving one as well, but it does take away some of the frustration. Even so, after only a few hours play I no longer cared about getting gold in events, or unlocking all the cars. Getting any medal at all was a privilege, and I just wanted to slog through to the end so I could say I’d beaten it.

I think whether you like NFS: Hot Pursuit or not comes down largely to your patience for and proficiency at technical racing. Underneath the façade of driving a Zonda with sirens and blasting cars with EMP is a serious game for serious drivers. If you get joy from finding that perfect line around a corner, buy it now. If, like me, you prefer to win gold by knocking everyone else off a cliff, maybe this isn’t the game for you.

6/10

Owen Atkinson

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