Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010)

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is a thrilling, high-octane racer that has a fun arcade gameplay, tremendous sense of speed... and tons of repetitive or annoying missions that are a chore to play. Oh yeah, and the game has the most insane rubberbanding I have seen.

I can't riff on the game too much since there's so much cool stuff in it. As I said, the game plays really well but in addition to that, the remastered version looks and sounds outsanding. The game has a super cool social feature called the Autolog that keeps track how your friend list does in the game and suggest races for you where your friends have beat your time. Hot Pursuit also has a nice selection of cars with the super cars being especially fun to zoom around in. The game takes place in one large interconnected area called Seacrest County and different racers are just different sequences within this larger map. I kinda liked this approach as you become familiar with different parts of the map during the course of the game. You can also choose to drive freely around the map but there is nothing to do in this mode other than to just enjoy the view and drive where you want.

Then, for the bad. The game has a lot of missions where you need to race or do a time trial with cop cars trying to mess you up in the process. These are called gauntlets and hot pursuits. You get some weapons to help dealing with cops (and other racers) but even these have their problems. Still, these races can be fun a few times but especially later on in the game, these become super annoying. Races can last more than five minutes, so it is pretty disheartening to break your car and get a game over because AI does something unexpected. All races have normal traffic also going on so it's not that uncommon running to some car that just drives (or flies as a result of impact) in front of you. And as I said earlier, the rubberbanding is out of control, especially for the cops. I'm pretty sure the cops often drive faster than 500km/h when the game decides they need to go in front of you to throw spike traps. The AI race drivers also seem to be quite badly rubberbanded with the weird bone-throw of them being noticeably slower near the end of the race. Like, come on, that's lazy.

In addition to multiplayer modes that I have not yet tested and the 'free drive mode', the game sorta has two campaigns: one for street racing and one for being a cop. In the former you need to run away from cops in the aforementioned missions and in the latter you yourself are a cop who needs to ram into fugitives to break their cars. I played the street racing one to completion (which already nets you the end credits) and did a few cop missions but we'll see. I didn't really vibe with them. I think I'd rather do some Autolog recommendations and try to beat my friends' times than to do those.

One of the rare instances when a remake/reboot end up being better than the original, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit brought the heat with its amazing controls, ultra realistic cars, and beautiful racing venues.

Acting as either a fugitive or a cop, you traverse a variety of locations and are tasked with completing courses that can range from timed events to police pursuits.

This game is visually astounding with its detailed maps that have an array of weather patterns (the thunderstorms are pretty sweet to race in) and a humongous roster of highly detailed cars with all model types. The controls are among the best of any racing game with seamless drifting and realistic feel when accelerating.

I'm not much of a racing game fan and mostly have only played the Need for Speed games and this is by far one of the best in the series.