Hot Pursuit, a reimagining of the 1998 original and 2002 sequel, levies hardcore street racing with policing the streets and enforcing the law. Developer Criterion Games took a tremendous step away from prior NFS titles to introduce a uniquely new concept, without making a cartoon or Death Race videogame of the series. Recreating roads based on actual California highways – most of which I’ve actually driven, albeit at sub-relativistic speeds (purportedly) – only furthers the seriousness of their creation, making it even more enjoyable. For as they say, great fiction is always based on reality. The same applies games.
Thus, we are given a choice: the racing elite with money burning holes in their pockets and a desire for unsafe velocities normally reserved for cartoon roadrunners and coyotes; or the police, the Seacrest County Police Department, which attains high-performance machines through unruly high taxes and the absurd number of wealthy residents therein. Whose side players wish to race for is a come-as-you-please affair. As I’ve found, some days just feel like a speed freak, while others demand more damage dealing and hand cuffing.
And that’s a good thing, because to really enjoy Hot Pursuit is to play it for weeks and months, not days. For reviews, we game critics tend to do the latter, because our readers want to know before the game releases and time is of the essence. In this case, I took my time, and am glad I did. Hot Pursuit is a title worth playing long after its release, even if they announced the following Need For Speed immediately after.
This system works surprisingly well, except when it doesn’t. As I played the single player campaign, I switched between playing as a racer and cop, but ultimately settled on completing the game as a racer first. In doing so, I finished every race at a level 14. As a cop, I finished at level 11, and for the last ten or so races had no choice on the race itself. I simply had to do this one, then that, until it was completed and the next opened up. This indicates a point system with a contingency for better drivers, though I was only better because I’d raced so much on the other half of the campaign.
In fact, the racer campaign is overall more enjoyable than playing as a cop. As the police, players must shut down races, which is tremendously fun, but cops don’t have as much pressure. They only need to worry about the racing vehicles. Compared to the same Hot Pursuit races (as they are called) for racers, the cops have it easy. Racers must avoid the cops and competing drivers, avoiding traps and attacks from up to a total of 13-15 other vehicles, helicopters included. As a cop, there is the game mode to catch an individual racer, who does whatever it takes to shake players and escape, but the AI is rarely intelligent enough to outrun or outpace any human. Finally, the police races are just not as good.
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