Review of NFS Hot Pursuit (2010)

Since last year's appearance in the series Need For Speed from the developers at Slightly Mad Studios, racing under the loud franchise was once again able to bring a sparkle to the eyes. With their project called SHIFT, they were able to give fans who love to race on the computer what Black Box could not give them, namely: excellent, accessible graphics, good gameplay, a cockpit view, beautiful car detail and other things that are inherent to truly quality racing projects. But EA realized that by developing the series in one direction, it was unlikely to please everyone. NFS is above all illegal racing, so it's hardly surprising that fans of Most Wanted or old-schoolers will love the policy of changing the train's course every year. In the end it turned out that EA, wanting once again to get more money from the fans, entrusted the development of games under this label to several studios at once, so that there would definitely be no dissatisfied people left. The lineup, it must be said, turned out to be quite decent (with the exception of the latter): Slightly Mad Studios, EA Montreal, Criterion Games and Black Box itself (which, judging by their latest creations, understands nothing about making good racing games). Well, never mind, it's not our business to sort out the personnel policy of the Electronic people, our business is to play. And on today's agenda we have the debut NFS project from the developers of the Burnout series, under a name well known to many – Hot Pursuit.

Before we've even properly entered the menu, we're already being led by the hand, in the style of "as if we're afraid to press an extra key," being told what's what. Right away we're asked to create an account in the Autolog system, which allows us to get online play features. At the same time, such a hint tells us that it will be far more interesting to race with friends than with bots. I don't entirely agree with that, since the computer intelligence here is quite decent, competing with the bots is very interesting indeed, and notably, the notorious ketchup is present only among the cops. How? Haven't I said yet? Yes, yes, just as in the spirit of the old parts, we'll again get to take part in thrilling chases with representatives of the law, whose vehicle fleet is quite diverse, and there's even a choice of which side to be on. There's an arsenal familiar even from the original Hot Pursuit such as spikes or roadblocks, and besides that the police have received such whistles as EMP and nitrous oxide at their disposal. There's nothing superfluous here (with the exception of another silly idea with levels), and in this case that's the right approach. In chases with cops, a small patrol will be up against you, but what a patrol! 4 Porsche Panamera is already enough to knock you off the track, since the cops now also like to push the rear axle of your car into a skid, surround you, throw spikes under your nose, in general, all the things that were present before, in the good old days. What's annoying is that the cop bots try to take out specifically you, paying no attention to your rivals. There's plenty of room to race, the map of all the highways resembles the map of Paradise City, except that the scenery has changed from urban to subtropical, island, plus the size has increased by about 3 times. You can even just drive around the roads without taking part in races, if that's what you want. In general, one gets the impression that the developers themselves played the classic parts of the series for a long time in order to understand the approach of the old EA team. However, the roots of the Burnout fathers still make themselves felt, and on every angularity of the game. For example, Criterion understands that for an arcade racer, spectacle and dynamism are very important, and in this aspect the developers missed somewhat. Firstly, the damage system, strangely enough, did not carry over from Paradise, apparently the developers were embarrassed to let the player smash the same Lamborghini to bits, but meanwhile, crashes are still shown to us as very spectacular collisions with a thousand sparks and the car's paint flying across every part of the screen. Secondly – the handling. It very much resembles what we saw in Hot Pursuit 2, 2002. At high speed, there's no difference whether you're driving a Porsche or a Dodge, the car still behaves like an unwieldy barge; to properly enter a turn, the developers brought in drifting, and exactly the same as in Burnout Paradise or in the Asphalt Urban mobile racing series, which is a rather controversial innovation. Thirdly – the soundtrack, which again turned out 50/50, there are genuinely good tracks worth driving to, but there's also real turkey-rock that you hate from the first chords. Is this a matter of taste? Like hell it is! The second part of "hot pursuit" showed that you should race first and foremost not to electro, but to alternative and rock; the Criterion folks are unlikely to be able to compete with the music selection there.



But what Criterion can do is pick the car roster. There are exactly as many cars in the game as there need to be; there's no point in overloading an arcade like this with vehicles, since all the cars differ only in speed anyway. SMS and Criterion have different approaches to car detail, and nevertheless the Burnout developers didn't let us down here and made genuinely high-quality polygonal models. And there's plenty to admire: right at the start of your career you can take a spin in a Porsche Boxter S, and in time more serious machines will unlock, such as the Lamborghini Gallardo, but if you're not a fan of exotics, please, at your disposal are Japanese "firecrackers" like Subaru, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and for the American in you there's Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge and others. There's plenty to choose from. On top of that, as before, the developers gave us the chance to hear a short lecture about the car. True, whereas before we could hear a technical description of the specs, now they're also garnished with marketing tinsel. Among other things, the game's graphics are up to par, the Burnout engine was refreshed and given more color, so here you can admire not only the cars but also the roads and the surrounding world. What's more, the game's system requirements are far from the highest for such visuals. But console players are not to be envied – on the Xbox 360 there's jaggies galore, anti-aliasing is sorely lacking at an already low resolution, plus anisotropic filtering works poorly, and road textures blurred to an unprecedented degree make you sick. Incidentally, on PC, for some reason, you also can't properly adjust texture filtering quality and multisampling.


But all this isn't so important; Criterion Games still couldn't get rid of the main flaw of their games – incredible monotony, which breeds boredom and, in some, even depression. After just a dozen races, unless you're in a fantastically fanatical state, you'll get tired of slicing through identical sprints one after another. Multiplayer, it seemed, should fix the situation – perhaps playing with people really is more interesting, though here the Autolog system boils down merely to letting you brag about your results to your friends.



Overall, the game leaves the feeling that this is exactly what lets you relax after a hard day of work or study, without half an hour of tuning the suspension and finishing seventh. But all this was already in Burnout, and in an even more thrilling style, though Hot Pursuit, unlike SHIFT, can genuinely be called Need For Speed. That alone is something to be glad about, since the world now has one more decent racing arcade; it would seem, what else was there to expect? But such games are already a dime a dozen in our world. And the fans from the 90s who so mourned the "wrong NFS" after the release of Underground, are unlikely to get what they wanted again under a new graphical shell.

Game rating – 7.0 points

Author: Airslasher.