Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Most gamers with any kind of interest in racing will have played a need for speed title at some point in their life. Without doubt the series has stagnated in recent releases so EA have passed the reigns to creators of the Burnout franchise Criterion to see what they can come up with to re-ignite the franchise and that is exactly what they have done.

Easiest way to describe the game would be to think Burnout meets meets Facebook with cops and robbers, and its the Facebook part which is very important, as now every race you drive, picture you take, speeder you bust is uploaded to the games own version of facebook. with a nice healthy friends list each time a friend races you with have an alert telling you of their performance on your wall and from here you can almost instantly go straight to that race and attempt to beat their given time etc. This really should be the future of how games run scoreboards, i would go out on a limb to say that 99% of players do not care where they rank in the world, only where they rank against their chosen friends and this caters to that theory perfectly.

Click on the image to be taken to the NFS: Hot Pursuit forum

The on track action flows superbly, no doubt their is some rubber banding in play but every race is action packed and you are always in the race, especially with the help of some of the various abilities to slow down your opponents from police helicopters to road blocks and electronic devices that all lead to an always entertaining action packed race.

At this point i would normally mention the negative points of the game, but in all honesty i’m struggling to think of any, it looks great, sounds great, plays great and generally speaking is great. Only slight negative i could say is this game really benefits from having friends to compete against so if you have no friends with the game you would be missing out on large portions of the score attack side of the game, although having said that the game does a great job in helping you find friends. Just like facebook it looks at your friends list and will say you have mutual friends with this and that person etc.

To sum up in a few words, if you like action racing games, have an online connection and a few like minded friends this is a must buy.