In a world full of remasters, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit doesn't get first place. The adrenaline that goes into each race or chase is super high. But the lows of the game loading and car handling weigh the game down. Hot Pursuit stays true to its roots and to that it deserves a nod. It's a fun racing game the developers can hopefully improve upon for future remasters.
In the era of remakes and remasters, there are plenty of games we expected to be enhanced. Need For Speed Hot Pursuit being remastered was a pleasant surprise. You don’t see too many if any, racing games upgraded for the current generation. Nonetheless, Hot Pursuit is one in the franchise that I remember fondly from my Xbox 360 days. So I sat down with the motorsport game to see how it handles after a whole decade.
The presentation of Hot Pursuit is exciting. Shown to you are two sides of the same coin. High-performance street racing versus nitrous fueled police chases. You are given a map that you can navigate through and decide if you want to be a racer or police officer. As a racer, you choose your vehicle and go head to head with x amount of opponents. Depending on where you end the race, that determines how much “bounty” you get to level up. Bounty is Hot Pursuit‘s term for experience points. You would get the maximum amount of bounty if you finish in 1st place. But you can accumulate extra bounty by losing pursuing officers or taking down an opponent. On the other side, you choose your police car and then go on patrol till you get a radio call of an ongoing street race. From there, you accelerate into a battle between yourself against the racers. You also accumulate bounty as an officer depending on how fast you can take out the criminals. There is also bounty given based on how you eliminate them.
A huge portion of the presentation is the vehicles in the game. There is a massive amount of cars to choose from, and they all are put into different tiers. The tiers make it so you aren’t driving a Ford Crown Victoria against a McLaren MP4. I found it enjoyable that the game doesn’t have any updated cars. The roster of vehicles stays true to the original game. Along the same lines, the cars still fit the year of said model. For example, the 2020 Dodge Challenger looks different from its 2010 model. In Hot Pursuit the vehicles have not made any changes. A large bright spot of the car selection menu is the narrator. When selecting a vehicle, you can hear someone talking and giving you some history and details about that vehicle. It is a nice way to learn a little about a lot. The narrator was something I found delightful in the original and I am glad it made its return. To offset that, the menu felt very clunky and shows it’s age.
Not every part of the game is a race. Often there are time trials where you need to use a certain type of vehicle. There are other objectives like a 1 on 1 race or even a 1 on 1 officer against racer battle. These different game modes try to break up the monotony. Despite this, I just found myself wanting more races or hot pursuits.
I was impressed with the upscaled resolution in Hot Pursuit. The environments don’t look the best, but it’s not about the scenery. The cars look fantastic. Even with motion blur, you can still see the detail of each vehicle. One of the notable instances, of the graphics, is when you are driving at night. The taillights make each car pop with vibrance. You can pause the game and look gaze at the beauty in the photo mode.
The handling of the vehicles is perhaps the most important aspect of a racing game. I remember the game having better handling in 2010. I am not sure if that is because racing games have come a long way since then or what. The cars felt heavy and nearly the same. Driving a Subaru Impreza felt identical to driving a Corvette. It should not be that way. They are a completely different size, shape, and weight. The only noticeable difference between cars was the speed. That Corvette was a lot faster than the Impreza. Taking the turns, and transition those turns to drifts felt sluggish because the cars did not feel to have their own identity.
One of the most disappointing things to me was the lack of gameplay settings. There was no option to adjust the controller sensitivity at all nor was there a button remap option. The fact photo mode was put in, but I couldn’t adjust how I played was upsetting.
Another frustrating aspect was the pause menu during a race. The pause menu seemed to have a latency issue. Whenever I would move my analog stick down to either leave the game, go to settings or restart race the menu took a second to realize I used the controller. It made it feel clunky. In that same vein, if you were to resume play the game wouldn’t allow me to control my vehicle for so many seconds. This caused some crashes right after a quick pause.
