Review by: Tom Chick

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is not a driving game. It’s a speed game. Point the car, squeeze the trigger, and you’re off like a rocket, careening down long undulating inviolable ribbons unfurling along the usual biomes. Braking is mostly optional. It’s more like surfing. The twist in this particular speed game is that sometimes your car is a gaudy cop car that looks like it drove off the set of The Fifth Element. Cars get mild superpowers to chip away at enemy cars’ health. You can also, of course, bump enemy cars. Unimportant crashes may happen. The whole thing is over after about four minutes, at which point you’ve probably unlocked something.

There are some good speed games, and Hot Pursuit developer Criterion has even been party to making some of them. But you’d never guess that this isn’t a throw-away title tossed onto the shelves after a short development cycle to keep the brand alive. It’s all so rote, relying on flash instead of anything resembling gameplay. The biomes you race through look good enough. The sense of speed conveys a sense of speed. The package has that slickly Electronic Arts veneer, with a steady drumbeat of rewards, as if Pavlov’s bell was wired to a metronome. Hey, you just unlocked an award. It’s a hawt car. So hawt. So sexy and hawt. Hawt. Sexy. Bam. Bam! Sexy bam! You leveled up! What good is leveling up? Don’t ask! Have a new car! A hawt sexy new car. Now go drive it and we’ll give you another one that’s ever hawter and sexier. Bam! Wow!

But once you get past all the manufactured excitement of this automotive Monty Haul, the central fact about Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is its lack of anything approximating driving. It’s ultimately a higher resolution version of Pole Position, where you jerk a car graphic around some scenery. The scenery and the car graphic have come a long way since Pole Position. The basic concept hasn’t.

The eponymous hot pursuits seem intriguing until you realize that it’s all about jockeying to knock pieces of health off an enemy car, which gives the game a thinly veiled combat mechanic. There are tire strips (mines), cannons (EMP blasts), guided missiles (police helicopters), and obstacles (roadblocks). Oh, and turbo boosting. The criminal cars actually get two (2) flavors of turbo boosting.

Single player races are politely rubber-banded so that minimum exertion is applied to the gruel thin gameplay model. Multiplayer matches are all about judicious use of your four powers, particularly since it's really hard to stage a car combat game along a length of non-interactive road-shaped ribbon. Collisions are supposedly a big part of the game, but it’s really a crap shoot whether you’re going to spectacularly total a car or gently nudge its bumper. This also applies to things like guard rails, which will mostly guide you back onto the road. Sometimes a guard rail will have the temerity to wreck your car. Hot Pursuit doesn’t have physics. It has under-the-hood die rolls.

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with a brain-dead speed game. But in a game built so completely around unlocking new cars, it’s hard to give the cars any personality when there’s no real driving. Some cars are faster. Some cars have better grip. And that’s about it. When you choose a car, there’s virtually no information about its performance. This is understandable, because these cars don’t have much actual performance. They have mainly their glossy shells and the insistent whine of their sometimes distinct engine noises.