Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (Xbox 360)
Posted by Kuang on Tue, 11 Jan 2011.
The Need for Speed series kicked off on the long extinct Philips 3DO console in 1994, and has mutated along the way from a simple point to point road racer, through open world street racing to a serious track based sim. Critics suggest that the series lost its way as it became more complicated, so the latest title arrives courtesy of Criterion - the brains behind the thrill-packed Burnout series of arcade racers.
The premise of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is simple, and builds on the original Hot Pursuit title from 1998, and the sequel from 2002. You can either race against other cars on a series of point to point tracks, or you can throw the police into the mix along with roadblocks and spike strips. Both titles allow the player to play as either the police or the street racers, so what has changed in the 12 years since the first instalment?
In this title you’ll run two separate careers side by side - one as a racer and one as a traffic officer - each with their own progression in the form of wanted level for racers, and rank for coppers. Climbing through these levels will reward the player with more races, cars and weapon upgrades. The races range from straight time trials to aggressive eliminations with the aid of a range of offensive equipment, and this time around the street racers get to play with some of the toys too. Progress is helped by a nitrous system lifted directly from Burnout, where boost time is awarded for dangerous, tactical or stylish driving.
If you’ve played any of the previous titles then nothing in there is particularly surprising, and I’m going to fly in the face of popular opinion here and suggest that’s the problem. EA have tried to recapture a more simplistic game from their past.. and in doing so have made a game that feels like it really is from the past.
The problem is that after playing one of each race you’ve seen everything the game has to offer. Increases in rank just bring new cars that don’t generally offer much over the ones you already have, and upgrades to weapons slightly improve the length of the effect and the recharge time. When you realise this there’s very little incentive to discover more, so the basic game mechanic has to be good in order to keep you playing. It’s not.
What I can’t understand is how Criterion appear to have taken a technological step backwards from Burnout. Hot Pursuit has a slower and chunkier screen refresh rate than Burnout Paradise despite the environments being far less complex and busy, and loses the sense of immediate speed as a result. You get some nice changeable weather but that’s about all on the visual front – I can’t understand the accolades this game has received regarding graphical quality. The cars look pleasant enough on the garage screens but then lose a lot of detail in-game. How could they achieve such a degree of technical excellence in the past and then forget it all? I can only assume someone at EA must have really upset the developers..
Average graphics in a racing game are acceptable if the basic gameplay works, but unfortunately there’s bad news on that front too. The cars in Hot Pursuit feel sluggish and simply don’t handle with the responsiveness that such a game demands. To return to Burnout Paradise again for a second, the sense of speed there was partly due to your ability to make last minute dodges and hit inch perfect gaps, In Hot Pursuit you can see a spike strip coming from 100 metres away, and still can’t steer around it quickly enough. This isn’t because the cars in this game are real cars with realistic properties either, as the relative speeds of the vehicles are nonsensical. Criterion have committed the cardinal sin of racing games, and one that also blighted Need For Speed: Shift, and that’s rubberband AI. The whole point of a racing game is that you attempt to beat the competition by driving better than them, but you feel cheated if you’re flat out in a Veyron and a slower car flashes past you at twice your speed. It’s painfully obvious that this inconsistency is used to balance progress because you’ll win a lot of races in the last half mile when a previously uncatchable car suddenly forgets how to use the top three gears.
If you can get past this and just want to get to the race, you’ll be disappointed there. Even though you have a ‘skip’ option on the pre-race cutscenes you’ll still be waiting a long time for the game to hand over control, which is not what you want from an arcade racer. When you upgrade a weapon you get a useless promo video from the ‘manufacturer’ that doesn’t even tell you the end effect of that upgrade. You can’t skip this, and you’re forced to watch it once in each career path because the game can’t get over the conceit that you’re two different people. Lack of attention to detail.
The final kick in the teeth comes from EAs ‘nickel and dime’ approach to game content. You buy the game at full price and then discover that certain cars and races in the list are covered by a shopping trolley icon, which means you have to pay extra to access them. There’s simply no justification for claiming a high retail price is needed to balance development costs, and then locking the contents you’ve paid for away unless you’re prepared to spend more. It’s a cheap moneygrabbing tactic that demonstrates the way DLC rot is setting in among the bigger publishers. As a final insult have to enter a voucher code to access the online facilities, which means it’s instantly worth less when you trade it.
The only part of Hot Pursuit that might count as interesting comes in the form of the Autolog, which is a system that tracks your achievements and compares them against you friends list so you know how your abilities stack up. It's a nice add-on, but nothing you haven't seen before elsewhere. If pushed for positives I'd also say that some of the cars look good in Police trim, but that's about it.
So in summary, you’re got an average racing game where almost every element of it is slightly more frustrating than it should be. It amazes me that Hot Pursuit has gathered top ratings across the gaming press, especially when you can buy the Burnout Paradise Ultimate box for a few quid instead and enjoy one of the finest arcade racers ever made. That’s precisely what I recommend you do.