Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

For me, racing games always break down into two categories. You have your hardcore realistic racers like Forza and Gran Turismo, and then you have your arcade racers like Need for Speed.  Now some of the benefits of arcade racers are that you can place the car in any environment, you don’t have to be Lewis Hamilton to drive it properly, and you can place the driver into any scenario you choose whether it be on a race track or on the streets or whatever.

Need for Speed over the past few years has focussed very heavily on the street racer / cop dynamic and it’s proven to be reasonably successful. I greatly enjoyed the Underground series and to a lesser extent the Most Wanted and Carbon at which point I gave up on the franchise.  It was that point I gave up on the series because what had started as a good night out, had degenerated into Need for Speed vomiting repeatedly and I was sick and tired of holding the bucket.

But along came Hot Pursuit to try and entice me back and I was being very careful about the whole thing.  I took a look around, read a few reviews, watch some game play videos and was very surprised by the fact that everything seemed to be suggesting that this was a good game. So I picked it up and had a go.

I quickly jumped into solo mode, had a few races and quickly realised why it was getting such great reviews. The simple fact of the matter is that the game is so well put together it’s hard to find a crack.  One thing that is immediately noticeable is how beautiful and varied the environments are. I’m not quite sure what areas of the world have a beach, mountains with snow and a lush forest area all within 5 minutes drive of each other but despite this fact, each environment was beautifully detailed and a pleasure to race through at 300+ km/hr.

The wide variety of cars (although Ferrari was a noticeable absentee among the likes of Porsche, Lamborghini and Bugatti) were also given the high polish but I was disappointed that attempts hadn’t been made to get the interior of the cars so players could have the option of a driver’s view, something which I found the absence of to be very disappointing. The cars reacted in a way that you expected them to with muscle cars being brilliant on straights but horrible around corners and other sportier cars ripping up corners very easily. Although don’t for one second think that this game is a realistic racer. I said at the start that Need for Speed sits in the arcade style racing and it’s not gone to try and change itself now. The cars react the way you would expect them to….if the laws of physics were reduced by about 50%.

The game play presented itself in a variety of formats. If you chose to do racing events, it usually boiled down to racing against one or more other cars or outrunning the cops in either a race or time trial while cop events usually just involved stopping a large group of racers or one lone racer. Both included an event to test higher ranking cars that you hadn’t unlocked yet just to give you a taste of what you had to look forward to. The variety of weapons that you have at your disposal as a racer and cop were also solid with both having road spikes and EMP bursts, but the racers had a turbo and EMP block system unique to them while cops had road blocks and helicopters at their disposal. With all the abilities that had been included, they were all very nicely balanced with one not necessarily being more powerful than another, it just all depended on the situation and how it was used.

So solo mode was solid and based solely on that, I would be more than happy to give this game a good review, but multiplayer was so heavily mentioned throughout much of what I had read, I had to give to a go.

Now if you’re connected to the online network with the game, you had access to the Autolog system which has heavily advertised as a means of putting together an online community for this game and you could find friends that you could race on a regular basis. I’m sure it does work but to put it bluntly I never put that much effort into it. I usually kept to the simple matter of finding a racing type, choosing a car class and racing until my heart was content. Now had huge fun racing online and it took me back to the days when I would spend hours online with Project Gotham Racing 3, doing battles with others from around the world, and despite what I am about to say, racing online is still something I do regularly.

There are some broken elements to the online system; parts being due to actions of the player and parts due to how the online racing was structured and programmed. Now two of the issues sort of mingle together and I’m going to do my best to try and explain them but I will start with the simple one. When you hit a car or road barrier while racing, you’re not written off until you do a certain amount of damage to your car. So if you crash out in spectacular fashion, you will respawn after a few seconds and you continue on your merry way. Whilst this works somewhat in single player due to rubber band AI, it doesn’t work very well in multiplayer as you will mostly likely never catch up. Now I think something like this is perfectly reasonable, but I have seen games just empty after a few players get stuck in the back with no hopes of winning and just leave, much to my frustration.

An issue on the similar train of thought is that of shortcuts. Now throughout the game, shortcuts will pop up and whilst most are balanced nicely and whether or not to use them will boil down to the type of car you’re driving (low riding cars slow down heavily on shortcuts) and your position in the race so the shortcut could be hit and miss in its usefulness. However there are a few shortcuts throughout the world that I dub mandatory shortcuts. Now these shortcuts are those that no matter what car you have, you take them because it’s guaranteed to be exactly what it says, a shortcut. However noting back to my previous point, if a group of racers takes the shortcut and one person doesn’t, that person has no real hope of catching up unless the other players suddenly get distracted by bright lights or they all have a catastrophic accident.

Amusingly enough there is also one shortcut that is so broken that, and I’m not exaggerating, you could be last, everyone else skips the shortcut, you take it, and you will end up in first place. It’s that broken and whether or not a player is “allowed” to take this particular shortcut seems to be a decision made by the group of players rather than the individual. Unfortunately there have been numerous times when I have taken the shortcut and have the whole game just empty of players and other times when I have skipped the shortcut in first place only to have everyone else take it and I end up in dead last and with a controller shaped hole in my wall.

A slightly smaller issue is the match up of players and while the matching system does try to keep players of certain levels together so they should all have access to roughly the same cars, it’s not perfect and there have been quite a few times that at a low level, I was matched with someone who was level 20 purely due to the fact there weren’t enough players online at my level for me to race.

So overall, what do I think of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit? I think it does what it was designed to do very well. It takes the player on an enjoyable racing experience without the needing the skills of a professional race car driver.