The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Everyone was talking about Burnout: Paradise like it was super awesome. I didn’t like driving games, but I tried it, and dammit, it won me over. It was fantastic fun, even for someone not serious about their driving and racing. Now, everyone was talking about Hot Pursuit along the same lines as Paradise. Armed with this new Gamefly account, I really wanted to see what Criterion followed that game up with. I had to rent Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. So I did.

While not the kind of revolution that Paradise was, Hot Pursuit is a really, really fun game, especially in multiplayer.

The single player is basically just a bunch of race events. There are two side by side “campaigns,” cop and racer. Racer events involve, well, racing. They are the events I care less about. Some are straight-up races, and some have cops trying to shut down the race as you race, but basically, your goal is to get to the finish line first. Cop events involve attempting to bring the racers to justice. You do this by wrecking their cars and brutally murdering them. Sometimes you are trying to shut down a whole race, sometimes you are trying to shut down one individual racer, and sometimes you’re doing a stupid time trial in order to get on with it and unlock the more interesting challenges.
Everything you do in the game earns you “Bounty” as a racer or cop, depending on your role in the event. This is basically a different name for experience. As you level up, you unlock new cars, new tiers of cars, and new events for the side you level up as. I don’t know why there is different EXP for cop and racer events, but since I don’t much care about cars or what I’m driving, I didn’t find myself particularly compelled to level up much anyway.

Basically, I found the racer events fine, though I don’t care about races. The cop events were, for the most part, a ton of fun. They’re variants of my favorite modes from Paradise, only with some more toys. Each side gets a limited amount of unlockable gadgets that they take into each event. You can do stuff like call in road blocks, drop tire-destroying spike strips, and jam your opponent’s gadgets. This gives the racing some extra spice, but somehow manages not to feel like Mario Kart. Since you have very limited uses, every item use is super important. The moment right after you release a spike strip is super intense, wondering if you wasted it or not. It works really well.

The best mode is the mode the game is named after, Hot Pursuit. Four racers try to complete a race, while up to four cops try to shut them down. The single player doesn’t do this mode justice: the moment I took the game online (with the free trial. EA and their fucking online pass, goodness.) and tried the real deal, it was even better. Having real people behind the wheels makes everything feel less cheap and that much more intense. Of course, I was bad at beating human players, but the game does a great job of still making everything feel tense, with people swerving all over the road and into oncoming AI traffic, throwing items left and right. Because you have a life bar and can crash quite a few times before you’re totally out of the race, I didn’t find being not all that great at driving discouraging. I just picked cars with higher HP and enjoyed myself. It was a blast.

Multiplayer is where this game is at. Even the single player is honestly based around the “Autolog” feature, which matches you up with things your friends have done in the single player to set special challenges for you on each race as you play. I wouldn’t buy it myself, because I won’t have people I know to online with and while playing with randoms is fun, I know eventually my lack of skill will start to dull the fun-ness of it. Still, if you like driving, this game seems like a game you should own. It’s a bit arcade-y, but it’s constantly fast and fun.