First Looks// Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Some people might think that getting the developer of a long running, and much loved racing franchise to step in to spruce up a long running and much loved racing franchise is the asking for a car crash.

How could a company that clearly has its own opinions on what makes a great open-world racing game and has ample and extremely successful opportunity to demonstrate those opinions (say, for instance Criterion Games), align those with the expectations of the audience of the second series (say, for instance, Need for Speed)?

Surely the risk is that the fans of both series could be disappointed? The resulting game could be too Burnout for fans of NfS; too NfS for fans of Burnout, and not enough of anything for anyone.

That's my premise. But for the attention deprived amongst you, I'll abandon it right now and say that that's categorically not what has happened. What has instead happened is that Criterion have hit the nail on the head once again, and in some ways surpassed their crowning glory - Burnout Paradise. At the same time they have given NfS - a series that I felt was foundering - a much needed nitrous boost to take it from Also Ran to Main Contender.

Need For Speed is one of gaming's most venerable franchises. Indeed, it's one of the few games series that even deserves to be called a franchise. Nowadays we hear the term applied to games in their second iteration, but Need for Speed has appeared in around 20 different versions since it first hit the streets on the 3DO, Saturn and PSX right back in 1994.

This latest version, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit shares its title with the third game in the series, released for PC and PlayStation in 2002, and both confusingly and swiftly followed by PC, PS2, Xbox and Gamecube versions called Hot Pursuit 2.

The Noughties brought us a stunning array of NfS titles, Undergound, Undercover, Carbon, Most Wanted, ProStreet, and Shift. Each was a massive hit in the charts, but not one got major screentime in the SPOnG Underwater Castle. This is a chilling indictment given that Motorstorm, Gran Turismo, Burnout Paradise and even Blur have all caused major interruption, and been the subject of late night beer and joypad session in the SPOnG milieu. We love racing games. More than almost anything else. But despite its stunning chart record, Need for Speed has passed us by.

Burnout Paradise on the other hand has been a religion in our offices. It was the first game that ever persuaded me (with my personal cash) to spring for DLC, and the first that made me spend serious time online. Burnout Paradise redefined arcade racing.

So we were concerned about our favourite racing game developer wasting their time on a series about which we were monumentally meh when they could have been working on Burnout Ecstasy. So when we got the invite to shlep to EA's Guildford offices to take a look at the Frankengame, we were on the train before the phone had hit the cradle.

Onto the New Stuff
Criterion's Creative Director, Craig Sullivan. was clear with me when I spoke to him: this wasn't a case of their paymasters making them do NfS to inject their brand of ultimate awesomeness into the underachiever. Quite the reverse, the racing game fanatics at Criterion have been itching to get their foot on the NfS throttle for years, and only now had the planets and schedules aligned in such a way to make it possible.

The result is what you might hope for, rather than what you might fear. Instead of a mangled wreck of two cars that met at high speed, the result is a lovingly-crafted hotrod, made with the best bits of Burnout's mechanicals, and the glossy bodywork of NfS. It looks like Need for Speed, but it feels like Burnout. That's a good thing on both fronts.

Criterion's criterion for what makes a good game is if you can pick it up and be having fun within three minutes. With Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, that box has a big red check in it, wrote large in a fat-nibbed marker pen.

Going Large
NfS HP takes place in exactly the kind of expansive gameworld that we came to love in Burnout Paradise, but this one is four times as large. This fact is not immediately apparent from the map screen because it was scaled to fit on screen. But once you take the wheel and begin to hit the road, it quickly becomes apparent that one aspect of the NfS series that has made its way into HP is the long races that characterised early NfS games.

You can compete in these events as a racer or as a cop. If you are the former, the aim is to escape; if you are the latter, the goal is to intercept the racers and shut down their illegal street racing antics. This is thoroughly traditional NfS territory, but it also echoes the Marked Man and Takedown Challenge aspects of Burnout too.