If Criterion can't top themselves then who can?
Hot Pursuit is pure high speed, no frills racing at its best. The game looks like Need for Speed but it plays like Burnout. The combination is exceptionally fun and takes the best of both worlds. The driving mechanics aren't geared to compete with simulation racers like Gran Turismo but they don't have to be. Criterion are the current kings of arcade racing and their talents are in full swing here.
A cohesive city of intertwined roads, much like Paradise City, has been constructed and events fragment the city, Seacrest County, into endless possible routes. At least that's the theory. In Burnout Paradise you were presented with a city, a starting point and an end point and the rest was generally up to you. In Seacrest County the events cut off alternate routes (in most cases) and make the courses quite linear. There are still shortcuts but they serve a slightly different purpose this time around. Some shortcuts shave off obscene amounts of time at the cost of minor terrain issues. Some side paths are helpful only if you have a powerful off road racer and some are just to fool you. In any case you're almost always going to be on the same path as everyone else.
The thing that bugs me is that while Paradise City felt alive and realistic Seacrest County feels anything but alive. The roads are long, arduous and devoid of civilization except for a few sparse areas. There's a charm to Paradise City that made driving fun because the environment was fun. Seacrest County doesn't have any charm. There are a few Easter eggs out there and you have the option to free ride throughout the city and take pictures of your fancy schmancy cars to share with your friends but it's an aimless endeavor.
The events and tracks are varied and deep enough to eat up a lot of hours and are well worth the price. Then take that amount of content and double it. Between being a renegade street racer and a dangerous officer of justice there's over 100 events to master. The racer events focus on winning races and evading the law. The cop events focus on destroying the racers. Also there's a healthy amount of time trials for both campaigns. I liked the races and time trials a lot but I personally didn't like the rest of the missions so much. Trying to win a race with several other racers while a swarm of relentless cops try to destroy you is quite exciting but just gets tedious. I never found myself conquering a Hot Pursuit event and thinking "I'd like to play that again!" It was more like "glad that's over…" Races and time trials though I found quite satisfying to play over and over to achieve the best time on the leaderboards. I just wish there were more of them and that you could choose any car you want.
If you've got a lot of friends with this game and are highly competitive you'll love the competitive aspect of this game. Even if you don't have a lot of friends the game will suggest people to add (friends of friends) that have played the game. There are few things more satisfying than finally edging out all my buddies on a tough course. The cop events are so luck based and exploitative that competing over those leaderboard slots just isn't fun. I wasn't as impressed with Autolog as everyone else because it's not any different than what Burnout Paradise offered with the Road Rules challenges except that Criterion took that concept and expanded it to encompass the entire game. It's a great idea to be sure but it wasn't anything radically new in my opinion. It makes me wonder if I'd be happier with a conventional simulation racer with more events and variety.
For everything good that Criterion brought to Need for Speed, Need for Speed brought something bad to Criterion. For one, Burnout Paradise had no loading screens except for brief ones introduced in a late update if you restarted an event midway through. Hot Pursuit has long and frequent load times. For me the load times were so long and frequent that I'm convinced that Autolog's online functions are integrated into the basic game. Trying to play the game without internet was an act of futility. Multiplayer is a big part of this game but it's a much stronger single player game.
There's so much focus on making the cars look gorgeous and making the action exciting that there's a superfluous amount of interruptions via cut scenes and exposition. If I want to restart an event because I didn't place first chances are I'll be interrupted by the game showing off some new item I unlocked and bringing me back to the title screen forcing me to navigate all the menus and load screens all over again. It sounds like I'm nitpicking but it seriously breaks up the flow and over complicates what should be a streamlined experience. I'd say for every hour of gameplay there was easily 10-20 minutes of load screens, menu navigation and unnecessary cut scenes. I thought Criterion hated loading screens, what happened?
The biggest problem I have I also had with Burnout: traffic. I understand it and I appreciate the effort but it breaks the game. Around any corner there may be a dozen cars inexplicably rounding the curve like a 70 year old paraplegic just waiting for me to crash at 200mph and ruin any chance of setting a good time. It was bad in Burnout and it's even worse here where winning a race or avoiding danger is much harder due to the new driving mechanics. This stems from a much bigger problem of lack of depth perception. Due to the limitations of the medium and the way racing games are designed your car is right in the middle of the action. If there's a car a few hundred feet away chances are you won't see it until it's too late. This could be from poor draw distances or your car concealing the road ahead. It doesn't help that you're going over 200 mph and traffic seems to go at a smooth 15 mph meaning they go from dot over the horizon to head on collision in about a half second. On an HD TV the traffic was aggravating at times; on an SD TV the game was completely unplayable at mid to high level events. I was willing to let it slide in Burnout Paradise but this time it's too much.
Is Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit the best racing game of 2010? I wouldn't doubt it, it's a solid game with a ton of content and great community features. Is it the best racing game I've played? Not by a long shot. I'm judging Hot Pursuit quite harshly compared to other racing games but it's only fair when compared to Criterion's outstanding track record. I feel like all the pieces were here to give me the updated, upgraded sequel to Burnout Paradise that I so badly wanted. However, Criterion couldn't pull it off and left us their unfinished hybrid for us to toy around with. I wanted to love this game to death and I wanted it to be exponentially better than it is. Unfortunately, it doesn't hit the standard I've come to accept and I worry that if Criterion can't top themselves then who can?