Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

Completed as of writing this review: Both campaigns with Gold medals everywhere.

Played this game since childhood, but never managed to complete it until only now, 10+ years later. What can I say - I’m satisfied with this game. I played only the PS1 classics in my childhood, so I was never fully into the street racing games everybody loves (I still have yet to play MW2005). So playing this was a really good experience. The cars are fast, the driving is smooth (with some goofy moments, but nothing’s perfect) and the graphics are astonishing for their time. I’ve finished both campaigns and I don’t know why, but the Cop campaign was more enjoyable than average Racer campaign. Maybe it’s because I liked the idea of winning by ramming the car over and over (yes, I understand that it’s not NFS and more of Burnout, but that’s how I feel). The driving though, man it’s smooth. I don’t get why some people prefer against this metaphor of “brake to drift”, because that’s probably what the real cars require to push to drift, as far as I know? The extra mechanics for Hot Pursuit aspect aspect are really cool too, but can be annoying sometimes. The challenge here is basically non-existent I would say. Only like 5 times I struggled with some missions before eventually getting the requirement for Gold medal. Yes, the rubber-banding can be ridiculous sometimes, but it was not so often to consider it a minus.

The graphics were top-notch. It still blows my mind how realistic everything here looked, and it was in 2010! Yes, you can argue that the moments where the graphics don’t look as good are really well-hidden (such as people’s faces), but the immersion is definitely here. The music is pretty mid though, was not a fan of most music, except for tracks by Pendulum, the main theme, some tracks the name from which I can’t recall and my personal favorite Big Weekend by Lemonade (yes, I don’t think NFS music should only be DnB or Rock). Also it was annoying to get the radio interrupted every time the pursuit began. Could’ve at least given the option to turn that off.

Anyway, I’m happy that I was finally able to finish the game and say farewell to it, truly an amazing experience that is worth checking out to everyone who likes racing games, that are not strictly located in the city.