ShankarNeed for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010
January 13th 2011 06:16
Electronic Arts has described the new Need for Speed game as the most connected game ever, with several open-world thrills, and some edge-of-the-seat racing excitement. And after 5 long and hateful years of possibly the worst games ever that were part of the Need for Speed series, I finally feel the need to agree with them. Being a die-hard Need for Speed follower ever since Need for Speed 2, I felt utterly disgusted when I played Pro-street and Undercover, and once Shift came out, I had lost all hope of the Need for Speed series on ever re-obtaining that top spot that Need for Speed: Most Wanted had throttled it into.But finally, with the latest installment of the series labelled Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) it looks like Electronic Arts has woken up and learnt from its mistakes. Hot Pursuit, which is basically a remake of the 1998 classic of the same name, sees the NFS series going back to it’s roots, and while it’s not the next Most Wanted of the series, it’s definitely a big step forward.
I’ve talked to a lot of my friends about this game, and all of them have said that it resembles the Burnout series too much, because of the change of developers (Black Box to Criterion). I beg to differ. Sure there are some similar elements, but the overall experience screams traditional Need for Speed; not Burnout wannabe!
I opened this half-expecting it to be an utter destruction of what was a beaut of a title! Thankfully, I was wrong. The game oozes of the attitude that sets it apart from the other arcade racers. You get to play both as a racer and as a cop. And there is no career constraint, which means you can play one race as a street racer and immediately jump into a cop car for the next one! I found this a bit off a damper though. It’s just weird being a screw-it-all hotshot with a fancy sports car one minute and then transforming into the hand of justice the next! The game has gotten a huge makeover in both the game-play and graphics departments. Now my system carries a measly ATi HD 4670 for graphics and I must say, I was impressed by the looks of the game even on such a low end card! It looks brilliant, with none of the cheap flippy-floppy effects that Undercover had.
The game sports an ‘Autolog’ system that monitors your friends times and puts it all up on a speed wall. We were constantly trying to beat each others times by ‘just a few seconds’ (Resulting in quite a few angry outbursts and some broken controllers as well). The sense of adventure that the game brings about in you is amazing. Worth mentioning here is the quality of the Artificial Intelligence in the game. They simply will do anything (and I do mean ANYTHING) to get ahead of you. They weave between cars causing confusion; Ram into traffic to cause a jam and hold up the racers behind them; One of them even tried to kill me! And when the cops come in, it gets really chaotic. Drifts are beautiful and quite easy to perform, which is good, because quite a lot of turns require a decent drift. The car handling left me just a little bit disappointed. All the cars seem to handle similarly and rather stiffly, thereby making it very difficult to coax them into turns. Another thing that put me off (but, I think that’s just me, because my friends loved it) was the fact that Street racers had to earn their nitrous by driving on the opposite lane, slipstreaming, taking shortcuts and drifting. The game also features an addition in the form of ‘equipment’. At certain races, your car get’s equipped with certain assets such as manully controllable spike strips, EMP mechanisms making it easier to catch street racers, if you’re a cop, and vice-versa.
While Electronic Arts has improved on a lot, they’ve not given the user much of an incentive to drive out in the open world, making it dull and boring after a while. But all in all, i fell that this game is an experience on it’s own and is a must for every Need for Speed fan out there. Like I said before, It may not be the best game out there, but it’s definitely a positive step towards getting there.
I’ve talked to a lot of my friends about this game, and all of them have said that it resembles the Burnout series too much, because of the change of developers (Black Box to Criterion). I beg to differ. Sure there are some similar elements, but the overall experience screams traditional Need for Speed; not Burnout wannabe!
I opened this half-expecting it to be an utter destruction of what was a beaut of a title! Thankfully, I was wrong. The game oozes of the attitude that sets it apart from the other arcade racers. You get to play both as a racer and as a cop. And there is no career constraint, which means you can play one race as a street racer and immediately jump into a cop car for the next one! I found this a bit off a damper though. It’s just weird being a screw-it-all hotshot with a fancy sports car one minute and then transforming into the hand of justice the next! The game has gotten a huge makeover in both the game-play and graphics departments. Now my system carries a measly ATi HD 4670 for graphics and I must say, I was impressed by the looks of the game even on such a low end card! It looks brilliant, with none of the cheap flippy-floppy effects that Undercover had.
Good looking visuals compliment the addictive gameplay
The game sports an ‘Autolog’ system that monitors your friends times and puts it all up on a speed wall. We were constantly trying to beat each others times by ‘just a few seconds’ (Resulting in quite a few angry outbursts and some broken controllers as well). The sense of adventure that the game brings about in you is amazing. Worth mentioning here is the quality of the Artificial Intelligence in the game. They simply will do anything (and I do mean ANYTHING) to get ahead of you. They weave between cars causing confusion; Ram into traffic to cause a jam and hold up the racers behind them; One of them even tried to kill me! And when the cops come in, it gets really chaotic. Drifts are beautiful and quite easy to perform, which is good, because quite a lot of turns require a decent drift. The car handling left me just a little bit disappointed. All the cars seem to handle similarly and rather stiffly, thereby making it very difficult to coax them into turns. Another thing that put me off (but, I think that’s just me, because my friends loved it) was the fact that Street racers had to earn their nitrous by driving on the opposite lane, slipstreaming, taking shortcuts and drifting. The game also features an addition in the form of ‘equipment’. At certain races, your car get’s equipped with certain assets such as manully controllable spike strips, EMP mechanisms making it easier to catch street racers, if you’re a cop, and vice-versa.
While Electronic Arts has improved on a lot, they’ve not given the user much of an incentive to drive out in the open world, making it dull and boring after a while. But all in all, i fell that this game is an experience on it’s own and is a must for every Need for Speed fan out there. Like I said before, It may not be the best game out there, but it’s definitely a positive step towards getting there.
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