The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There was a fourth of July sale on the app store, because seriously, any occasion is a reason for an app store sale. I had been talking to Cara about games she should get. I knew she liked driving games, and I saw Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit HD on there for a buck. I really enjoyed the console version, so I figured it was worth a try for a dollar, and maybe I could recommend it to her! So, of course, I bought it. Come on, I buy everything on iOS. Are you really surprised?

Hot Pursuit on iOS is fairly impressive. The visuals are very high quality for the platform, and it has lots of the features of the normal game, like an Autolog that you can use to compare scores with your friends. Well, if your friends are actually on an EA account and have friended you. It’s a shame it doesn’t use Gamecenter. But yeah, it’s got all the little things you’d expect if you’d played the console game.

The game controls well, too. It defaults to an “auto-accelerate” mode, which is really just the best for the way racing games on the platform work. You can swipe up on one side to use your turbo, tap buttons to drop your spike strips or call in roadblocks, and pressing on the left side is your break, for tight turns and such. Oh, and you turn with motion controls. They all work pretty great, though the default setting for the motion controls is way, way too insensitive. It’s hard to make careful turns with it on the defaults. After I cranked the sensitivity most of the way up, though, I didn’t have many problems. Well, besides my normal lack of driving game ability, anyway.

While it is quite fun, there are bits of the game that really stick out, because the rest is so polished. The cars, for example, have no damage modelling at all. You “wreck” a car, but it doesn’t look like it’s been harmed in any way. I suppose that’s just a compromise they made to make it run smooth on iOS, but since the game does the same sorts of “LOOK AT THIS CRASH!” slow motion camera moves that the console game does, it really kind of sticks out. The other part that sticks out is the track design. After playing a bunch of rounds, it becomes clear that the game consists of a lot of track “segments” that they stitch together in different ways for the various courses you race on. It wouldn’t stick out so much if some of the segments, like a bit where you go through a tunnel, weren’t so distinctive to draw your attention to it. The segments are also fairly long for something that wants to be remixed like this. It’s a strange decision, to be sure.

Basically, it’s a nice little port of the console game. It works, and it is fun, though there are more straight-up race missions than the console version, and since I only like to blow up cars, it didn’t last as long for me. It’s not the kind of completely new and really polished and fun game experience as, say, Dead Space was, but EA knows how to make an iOS counterpart to their games, certainly. If you wish you could drive a car on iOS, this seems a damn fine option, especially at a dollar. At the normal price of ten bucks, it’s a bit pushing it, though. But again, any excuse will be reason for an iOS sale, so throw it on App Shopper and enjoy awhile from now!