Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, released in November 2010 by Criterion Games and Electronic Arts, is the sixteenth Need for Speed and the one that fixed the series. It is a reboot and a revival at once, bringing back a name last used in 2002, and it does the one thing Criterion has always done better than anyone: it makes going fast feel dangerous and going faster feel necessary.
Seacrest County
The setting is fictional Seacrest County, modeled on the landscapes of California, Oregon and Washington, and it is a place built for speed. Coast roads, mountain passes, desert straights and forest switchbacks, all of them wide enough for a chase and narrow enough to punish a mistake. The game’s rule is that all is fair, and both sides get tools to prove it.
Cop and Racer
You play both sides. As a racer, you throw spike strips behind you and hit a turbo to break away. As a cop, you set roadblocks and call in a helicopter to drop spikes from above. The two careers run in parallel, and switching between them keeps the game from settling into one rhythm. Being hunted and doing the hunting are different pleasures, and Hot Pursuit understands both.
The Driving
Criterion’s handling is the star. Cars drift wide and recover with a flick, crashes are cinematic, and the sense of speed on a straight is as good as the genre has produced. The developer, working here alongside EA Digital Illusions CE, brought the same feel that made its earlier racers famous, and it fits this material perfectly.
Autolog
The game’s other invention is social. Autolog tracks your friends’ times on every event and puts them in front of you constantly, so that every race becomes a challenge from someone you know. It turned a single-player game into a permanent, low-key competition, and the industry copied it within a year.
The Reach
It shipped on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, Wii, iOS, Android, webOS and Windows Phone, with the Wii version handled by Exient Entertainment. The console and PC versions are the ones that matter.
Where It Falls Short
There is no story and no pretense of one, which will bother players who want a campaign. The weapons can feel arbitrary when a spike strip from a car you never saw ends a race you were winning. And the event structure repeats. Race, chase, time trial, repeat, across a county that, for all its beauty, is a set of roads rather than a world.
The Verdict
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is a nearly perfect arcade racer. It knows exactly what it is, it does it with more skill than any of its peers, and it added an idea, Autolog, that outlived it. This is the one to play.
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