If it were late 90s-early 00s it would be impossible for me not to play and rant about NFS games. I’ve played them since the 3DO original, despite never being a huge fan of racing games. And up until Most Wanted in 2005, the only title I didn’t play the year of release was Hot Pursuit 2. After MW, however, there has been just one NFS game that I highly enjoyed and that game was Hot Pursuit (2010). After the “street racing” phase of the franchise, started in Underground, has grown stale, the new Hot Pursuit (not to be confused with the third game in the series from 98) suddenly revitalized the franchise by simply going back to its roots, while keeping all of the innovations from the 00s. It felt like a “best of” compilation of the series and even 10 years later (well almost 11 now) in this Remastered form it remains amazing. Despite the fact that not much has been “remastered”.
As a return to the classic Need for Speed formula, Hot Pursuit is all about fast expensive cars going from point A to point B along the picturesque roads, occasionally avoiding the police on the way. No car customization or tuning (apart from paint colours), no open world busywork, no laps, no story. You select a race, choose a car, start racing, as simple as that. But it’s not just a pure essence of Need for Speed 1 through Hot Pursuit 2. Nitrous is here, as not having it in a racing game, especially an NFS one, would’ve been simply weird at this point. It’s a fun mechanic and it works similarly to how it did in Underground and later for Racers, but slightly different if you play as a Cop. And on top of that, both sides get 4 special tools to play with (one of which is a spike strip from the classic NFS Police cars), when it’s not a pure racing event.
Criterion didn’t even try to focus on the open world here, despite the map being continuous and despite Burnout Paradise being such a huge hit because it was open world. And I’m extremely glad that they were able to keep it simple. The nature of the map does mean that some of the wilder tracks from classic NFS, like driving inside an active volcano or in an underwater tunnel were not recreated. Which is a bit of a shame – more “serious” racing games should do something this wild. But it provides just enough variety and at the same time familiarity, so the races don’t get bored, yet every time you recognize a part of the map, you know how to drive on it without glancing at the mini-map.
As I’ve said, I’m not huge on racing games, mostly because I don’t like the simulation aspect, preferring the more arcade experience. And Hot Pursuit lands perfectly in the spot between feeling “heavy” and “real” and also being very easy and fun to control, just like what the studio was able to pull off with their Burnout games. The sense of speed, the way the cars turn and drift, the way the nitrous works, every time a titular pursuit starts and cars start crashing and getting wrecked… This game is just fantastic at being tense and fun at the same time. A feeling that is, actually, even enhanced when played in multiplayer. Something that I also don’t usually care about, but enjoyed with this game.
Now, it’s not fantastic in absolutely every way and there are some weird decisions or annoyances. Like the fact that if you unlock something after the race ends, you must sit through the unlock screens and then get booted to the map, even if you lost, because the Retry option only appears if you haven’t unlocked anything. Or the fact that in the Interceptor mode in single-player, the AI driven racer is completely impervious to all damage from crashes, while your police car is not, leading to genuinely annoying moments where it feels outright “unfair”. Or how someone thought that it was a good idea to include three Race events that last over 8 minutes (the last one lasts for 14), since a single mistake might mean that you’ve just wasted all this time and must restart the otherwise rather boring race again. None of this is tweaked or changed in the Remastered version, which is a bit of a shame.
So what does Remastered version do? For one, all of the DLCs from the original game have been integrated into the main flow and they are mostly very nice, both in terms of the additional cars and in terms of the events they provide. The multiplayer is crossplatform now, which is fantastic – I constantly played with people from PC, Xbox and Playstation when trying out the modes, so that means more people playing. Also it works, since the multiplayer of the original game has been killed off. The visuals have been tweaked, not as dramatically as some might wish, but the game already looked really good and it hasn’t aged as much since. And that’s the main things, really. Also three cars have been removed, but it’s hardly important with such a huge selection.
It’s a shame, that the new version is tied to Origin/EA Desktop on PC. It’s a more seamless integration for the multiplayer and the Autolog concept (which is basically about setting records for your friends and beating theirs). But for a game as great as this one, it would’ve been nice to see a DRM-free option with the account necessary only if you use the online components. The soundtrack has been unchanged too, which is a bit of a weakness too, since it wasn’t as great as what was usually expected from NFS soundtracks. The game is locked to 60 FPS max, which is higher than in the original, but still a shame that it wasn’t possible to unlock it. And crash cams are as annoying as they ever were and remain always on, which screws you up more often than the developers clearly thought they would.
So, while Remastered isn’t as amazing a package as it could be. And if you still own the original game and care only about the single-player component, you should only consider getting this for the integrated DLCs, which weren’t available on PC before. But if you have not played Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit before and if you’re in any way interested in arcade racing titles, this is one remains one of the greatest.