Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit REVIEWED!

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

Platform: Playstation 3, X-BOX 360, Nintendo Wii, iPhone and PC

Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Criterion Games
Genre: Racing

Release Date: November 16, 2010
Rating: E10+ for Everyone 10+

Story:

Going back to its roots, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit puts you behind the most beautiful and exotic cars to become the amazing street racer, OR the most fearsome cop in Seacrest County!

Pros:

You get the true source of what makes the Need For Speed (NFS) series as famous as it is! I mean MAN, it's about time we get back to NFS being NFS. After going through SO MANY BAD games that held the series' name hostage I'm so glad I can go back to being a crazed street racer, avoiding cop blockades and spike strips, then being able to be a maniac cop hunting down a set of racers tearing down the highway.

So if you ever had a chance to play the Burnout racing series, understand that the same team behind that is the very same one who made this gem. So your car now takes some real serious DAMAGE. It's pretty insane to see your car flying down the street against oncoming traffic either avoiding cops or taking someone down and suddenly... BOOM, you just kissed a van head-on! But unlike Burnout: Paradise (the latest of the Burnout series), you get to drive licensed vehicles, and you are not driving around [forever] in a free-roaming city waiting for something to happen.

When it comes to the graphics, I guarantee you will be shocked at how clean and polished this game looks, especially (for the detail oriented gamers) since it doesn't run at 60 frames, but at 30! This game downright excites me! So much fun to play and to look at. The scenery is just beautiful. You can see the that when it rained in an area that the street is actually wet and the physics of the game changes with the climate change. So expect to adjust your turns and controlling your speed so you don't collide into a wall, guardrail, truck, or a divide. The music is top notch. They get the rights to share some really good popular music that really put you into the mood to race your butt off. 30 Seconds To Mars has a song on here that made me REALLY want to get more of their music just because I now associate "AWESOME" and "FAST" with their sound. It's also kind of funny hearing the police force get flustered when you get past one of there many obstacles.

Speaking of obstacles, you get weapons for both your cop car and for your street car. YUP! Weapons! With the cop cars you get to call for a blockade, drop spike strips right behind you while driving, a helicopter (to hunt and slow down racers that are getting away) and an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) to temporarily immobilize targets right in front of you. BANANAS! As an illegal street racer you get a turbo so you can blast right through roadblocks, jammers (shuts down all radar/maps and EMPs they were about to shoot), spike strips, and EMPs!! SUPER BANANAS!!

The coolest thing they added was the AUTOLOG. This is a way to combine multiplayer with your single player career mode. It will post online any of your accomplishments and you can compete against your friends' career mode skills without having to play each other right then and there. If someone tops your time the game will let you know the next time you start the game up, which if you get as competitive as I do will lead to you replaying certain races just to stay on top. Also with Autolog you can post on the WALL with a message with it, so you can brag hard.

Online gameplay is very important and they did a great job with this game. You can enter a room and play against 7 other people. What is interesting is the way the system picks half of you to be racers while the other half plays as the cops trying to stop the racers from reaching the finish line. It seems that NFS tries to keep it even by not making you a racer every time you play so that your stats can expand evenly. You also get to use the weapons that are in the career mode to help you succeed.

Cons:

Okay, now I can't really say that this game comes with many cons, but they exist. One of the things that bother me is that there's no split screen multiplayer, which is kind of a bummer. I really want to send a friend sitting next to me crashing into a wall or other cars. The difficulty is weird because the first set of races are so easy that sometimes I purposely tried to lose but when you come to a certain spot in the race the AI cars seem to slow down. Later you get challenge races where you have to use a specific car for some type of time trial and it seems that it's almost impossible to get the gold. Frustration ensues.

Overall:

When I played the limited time only demo, I knew this was going to be an excellent game. I bought it and I am MORE than pleased with it. If you are looking for a fun arcade style racing game that is truly the love-child of classic Need For Speed with the graphics and physics of Burnout, then do yourself a big favor and pick this game up!

Final Rating: 5 out of 5

- Jason