Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Review
This racer proves that gameplay can make up for ANY flaw. Some might say that Need for Speed took a wrong turn with its recent games. In all fairness, they were decent racers with plenty to offer, but they just couldn’t live up to the pedigree once owned by the NFS franchise. Criterion have looked to rectify this by shifting things up a gear with 2010’s Hot Pursuit, and in doing so they’ve left all the other recent games in the series in the dust.
Let’s make one thing clear: This is a racing game. It is not going to thrill you with its gripping storyline, nor is it going to keep you in the garage for hours whilst you tune your car and look at performance graphs. You are thrust straight into the action with very little explanation as to who your character is or any sort of cutscene, but you won’t care about that once you tap the accelerator. Some players may find the lack of options to be a little basic, given today’s focus on customization and replayability, but Hot Pursuit is strictly about driving thrills – and lots of them – so if that’s what you’re looking for from a racing game, you’ve come to the right place.
Gameplay As has been mentioned, there is no story to speak of past a continuous game of cat and mouse between the cops and the speeders. The main screen presents the player with two gameplay options: Offline and Online. The entire experience is designed to put the player in the driver’s seat as quickly as possible, and this works to the game’s advantage. Selecting Career will allow the player to choose “missions” or events for either side – cops or speeders – and the option to switch between one and the other is available. This subtly changes the play style required, and reduces the likelihood of getting bored with either faction’s missions.
Upon selecting a mission and a car, it is time to race. There are no standing starts in Hot Pursuit – all missions begin with a short cutscene and start with the car travelling at speed – which again works in favour of the game’s feeling of fast-paced gameplay. The cars all seem to have their own personalities in terms of handling, though there isn’t really a statistic to tell you this when selecting them – in fact, the only stats given to the player are acceleration, top speed and RPM, which makes for a lot of trial and error in finding a car that fits your style of play. However, this again encourages experimentation and serves to keep the gameplay fresh – there is no single car that dominates each class, allowing players to really express some individualism.
On the other hand, the lack of tuning options and the preset number of paint jobs does mean that players won’t become attached to any one car. If you’ve played Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, you’ll know that your guns become much more personalised on Black Ops – they’re your signature in the field of battle – whereas everybody had the same gun in MW2. This premise is similar to Hot Pursuit and, say, Forza 3 with its decals and wheel options. It would have been nice to see some optional customisation included for those players who enjoyed expressing themselves through their car, but at the end of the day I would still much rather play Hot Pursuit than Forza.
In terms of racing, this game will be very familiar in terms of look and feel to anybody who has played a Burnout game. After all, it was handled by Criterion; the creators of Burnout. They’ve done a great job of making the game playable and exciting, and most players I have spoken to agree they have done the NFS franchise justice. As with all Burnout games, the focus here is on speed and crashing, and both are done to perfection. There is nothing quite like crashing one of the world’s most expensive cars into oncoming traffic, be you pursuing or escaping. Tension runs high at all times and one wrong move can cost the player dearly, but it is still possible to make a comeback should this happen. That is the beauty of this game – each move, each twitch of the thumb stick is critical... but the same goes for every other cop and racer. Watching somebody crash at 200mph behind me because they were trying to avoid my spike strip is one of the most rewarding gameplay experiences I have had in a long time.
Speaking of the ‘power-ups’, the game has a limited selection – but this again is fine, because not a single one is useless. They are also all believable – the cops can call in road blocks or helicopters, the speeders can use turbo or jam communication systems – there are no bouncing koopa shells here; once more contributing to the game’s slick presentation and atmosphere. When called in at the right time, they can make all the difference to a pursuit and again add to the split-second tension offered by the game.
The only issue I have with the gameplay is the rubber-band AI. It is tricky for a developer to know just how elastic to make the computer-controlled opponents so as not to make for a boring race, but also not to take away from a player’s skilled racing – and most of the time Criterion seem to have hit the sweet spot. Somebody is constantly on your tail in Single Player, yet there have been instances where I seem to have been unfairly punished by cars with a lower top speed than my own managing to beat me to the finish line after a perfect race.
All in all, you will not find a more tense and exciting racing experience than this. It is high-velocity excitement, distilled down to its purest form. It makes no excuses for it, and it does not need to.
Presentation:
Put simply, this game is gorgeous to behold. Once again there are not as many aspects of graphic design as there might be in other games, but Criterion have ensured accordingly that each aspect of this game looks its best.
The car models all faithfully recreate their real-world counterparts. They also all sustain damage, with bumpers hanging off and paint being chipped away as time goes on. It is nice to see such prestigious and high-end cars being subjected to this kind of damage, as it adds another reason to drive well – to keep your precious Lamborghini Gallardo from looking like you let your grandmother drive it to the shops. The paint jobs look crisp, and the pearlescent ones only add to how gorgeous some of the cars look. Each car’s SCPD variant looks infinitely more bad ass with its own individual placement of police lights, bumper and menacing paint-job.
The environments all appear to be just as lovingly crafted, with a meticulous attention to detail. There are plenty of open roads on freeways and through small towns, and often your eye will wander to the impressive background visuals – only snapping back to your car when it is bouncing off a corner because you weren’t paying attention. The variation in locations also keeps the player from becoming bored – there are snowy mountains, enclosed forest tracks, long desert stretches and coastal roads to name but a few. To be quite honest, I haven’t yet begun to recognise many lengths of track, knowing which turns are coming up just by looking at my surroundings, but this is because your attention is often so focussed on not crashing that you will not have time to memorise the roads – it is not at all anything to do with the environments being forgettable.
The menu system fits the overall atmosphere of the game well – it is slick, and looks futuristic. If Tony Stark made game menus, this would be the result. The in-game HUD follows a similar minimalist style, and again fits the high-tech feel of the rest of the game.
Sound:
Once again, the sound can hardly be faulted in Hot Pursuit. The menu noises are just as futuristic-sounding as the screen looks, and the almost monotonous female announcer sounds like an on-board computer system, which is a nice touch.
The cars each have their own engine note, and sound just as I would expect them to – the Lamborghinis sound like Lamborghinis, and the muscle cars sound suitably meaty. A nice touch is that upon selecting a car, it revs a few times. Just from this sound alone, the adrenaline will start pumping – a sign of how well-produced the sound is.
The in-game music is well-thought out too. In single player, a radio plays catchy songs from a good selection of artists. The songs compliment the mood of the racing well. In Multiplayer or in offline chases, the music is suitably tense and again fits the mood well. Also the police chatter over the radio seems realistic and often adds to the feeling of tension in pursuits. Driving as a cop car thankfully does not get annoying because of the siren wailing away. A nice touch is that when a player crashes or their car is at critical damage, the sound weakens.
Multiplayer:
The multiplayer experience is the highlight of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. Like many other areas of the game, options are limited but done to perfection. Players can choose to participate in Pursuits, Interceptor (1v1) or straightforward Races. The majority of fun (for myself) is to be had in the Pursuits, where a group of up to 4 cops have to take down up to 4 speeders. Each player has an individual number of power-ups, but cannot stack certain ones – for example, only one cop can call in a roadblock at once and it also has a cool-down time. This helps balance the multiplayer gameplay, as does the fact that there is no game-breaking power-up.
As has been mentioned, no single car dominates each class which means players can expect to see a good variety of cars on the road, yet it would have been nice to have a way to further personalise cars.
Multiplayer action itself is incredibly exciting, with options for tactics left wide open. Four cops can take down one speeder at a time, or go after one each. Speeders can leave each other to race to the finish, or try and hinder each other. Not knowing who’s after your car – from 0 to 7 other players potentially – really makes the game unpredictable and allows for a lot of variety from match to match.
Longevity:
The main point of this entire review has been to explain that this game is for those who want an exhilarating competitive racing experience. If that is you, you will find plenty on offer here. If you are looking for an exhilarating car ownership experience, it may be best to give this a try but to stick elsewhere in the long term. The replayability of this game depends entirely on how much enjoyment players can derive from racing different cars on different tracks against different opponents, and not much else. Personally, I find each race to be different and the gameplay is exciting enough to have had me hooked for at least 20 hours’ playtime now.
Players can continue to unlock cars in multiplayer for use in their single player game and vice versa, and unlocks for both online and offline modes come at a steady and good pace.
The most innovative feature of the entire game, however, is what may prove to extend it’s useful life for a lot of players. The Autolog system is a social network style arrangement, where friends can challenge each other and beat each other’s times. It can recommend races and lap times for players to try and beat, and allows a bit of trash talking should the players beat their friends. It works well and adds another avenue of competition to the game, and is something I predict big things for in the future – not only in Need for Speed, not only in the racing genre, but throughout gaming as a whole. I am very impressed with Criterion for putting this feature in the game and I would say they deserve a lot of credit for moving social competition forward. It breathes new life into previously completed races – for example my friend picked the game up and beat my score on a track I completed weeks ago, which gave me a reason to try the track again using new cars I’d unlocked since.
If by now you haven’t realised that Need for Speed is the most streamlined and most rewarding racing game to be released in months, then maybe I should stop writing reviews. This game admittedly doesn’t do as much as rival games do, but it doesn’t need to apologise for that fact because it more than makes up for it in terms of what it does offer – which is racing, good racing and amazing racing. If games could speak, this one would say “I don’t need no fancy options to prove how good I am, I let my gameplay speak for itself”... and it would be right. If racing games were superheroes, Need for Speed would be Batman – no special powers except for a few high tech gadgets; one of the best franchise reboots of our time, and a totally bad-ass luxury car collection.
9.5/10: The speed, thrills and crashes in this game place it firmly in pole position for the title of best racer of Christmas 2010. If you like arcade-style racing and you have a competitive streak, this game is for you. If, however, you want a more involved car experience than simply driving them, try before you buy.
Pedal to the Metal!
+ Thrilling racing
+ Beautiful visuals
+ Good selection of cars
+ Great for friendly competition
Insurance Write-off!
+ Rubber-band AI sometimes unforgiving
+Some players may be put off by the lack of options
+ No car customisation features