Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

First off, this review is written from the perspective of someone who loved the NFS Most Wanted police chases, so if you didn't, for whatever reason, you can probably disregard this review.
This game is a painful miss on most fronts - I've been playing the Need for Speed series for many games, and I know Criterion can make a game fun from their Burnout franchise, but they've utterly misunderstood what people want from a NFS police chase game.
First off, though, you're forced to sit through an un-skippable advertisement/trailer for another EA game when you first launch the game - thanks EA, I really had nothing better to do with a minute or two of my time.
On to the game itself and oh dear, it takes a few races before you begin to realize that there's no openness to this game, it's just one pre-set course after another selected from a menu. No open city to explore, run and chase through like there was in Most Wanted. Sure, there's a mode that lets you drive in the map freeform, but you can't perform any gameplay here (race/chase), it's purely for time wasting. Even on that front it's pointless, as because the map was designed for pre-set routes, not open world driving, there are almost no turns or junctions. The entire game world is made up of maybe a dozen roads, that's it. Worse, they're all the same. Sure some have snowy mountain backgrounds, some have sea or forest backgrounds, but the roads all have the same turns. No corner requires a different technique or approach from any other, once you've tackled one you've mastered the entire map.

Oh well, maybe the cars will be good enough to make you forget the game is set in Generictown. Afraid not - they're all identical. Sure, one looks like a Zonda, one like a BMW and so on, but the driving is identical. I don't mean the handling, I mean everything. The stats given for the cars are utterly irrelevant. Want an example? Drive a 188mph BMW M3 in a race with a 155mph Audi TT. Get ahead of the TT and drive down a straight at full throttle. Watch the TT pull up behind you like magic. Drive a Lamborghini, watch a Mustang hit a roadblock and stop dead, watch it pull up behind you after 10 seconds of acceleration (during which time you were doing a steady 200mph). This kind of thing is universal - it doesn't matter what car you chose as either police or racer, slower cars can catch up on pure speed and you can catch up to faster cars. The catch-up AI just leaves no room for any difference between cars. None of it makes any sense and it reduces the gameplay to just pushing the odd button now and then.
That problem minimizes the impact of the next problem somewhat;

Despite how simple the unlocks should be now there are no modifications to unlock, just cars and weapons (EMP, spikes etc), it still manages to make no sense to anyone.
Firstly, there are so many "Preview" events that let you drive the fastest cars in the game long before you unlock them that there's feeling of reward when you do finally unlock it.
Secondly, you don't have to earn the unlocks by earning money then choosing to spend it on one car or another - you just unlock them all in linear fashion whether you want them or not, so there's no "reward" or feeling of pride or ownership over any of the cars.
Thirdly, for no reason that's explained, each race seems to allow you to use only a small sub-section of cars you've unlocked. Just unlocked a brand spanking new Koenigsegg and desperate to try it out? Too bad, this race only allows you to chose a TT or an M3, the next only lets you choose a Maserati or an Alfa Romeo, maybe you'll get to use your new unlock in 3 races time (by which point you'll have done another "Preview" event that lets you drive a Bugatti, reducing the impact of your new car to zero). The unlocks are similarly flakey; just unlocked an upgrade for your EMP weapon? Too bad, the next race you're told "Due to cut-backs in the police department you only get spike strips for this race" (cut-backs to a police department that uses Veyrons as police cars?). None of it makes any sense and it all creates confusion and frustration in the player with zero sense of satisfaction or reward for your work (the complete opposite of the point of an unlock system).

Oh well, maybe the driving feel will be so good it won't matter if it's essentially only one road and one car. Guess what? The handling could only have been designed by someone who has never driven a car and gets their ideas on how they work from Fast and the Furious films. I don't expect a sim like GTR2 or LFS, but the handling is just exactly like Burnouts, which completely mis-fits with the NFS style and the police pursuit gameplay.
I could go on and on but this review is already too long from giving just some examples of the failure. Just buy Most Wanted for a few quid and you'll enjoy it much more. If you work as a designer at Criterion, fire yourself. It was hard to mess up what only needed to be a modern day Most Wanted, but you managed it.

The reason for not to buy it on PC is because EA is only making DLC for consoles. This means PC gamers will miss out Bugatti Veyron Supersport, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, Gumpert Apollo and more. The other reason is perhaps the graphics bugs that people has been going on about. Personally I have no trouble with it.

I won't repeat what other people have said about the gameplay but it does handle like burnout except the fact that it is quite hard to predict the drift. But the learning curve is not steep. I suggest you go to your nearest HMV and have a go at it to judge it yourselves.
Career and freeroam are isolated modes. You have all the roads to yourselves in free roam. It's good when you want to take your favourite exotic for a drive without police disturbing, but it gets boring very quickly. Unlike Most wanted or Carbon, your only concern is to finish the race. Once your done, you move on to the next. There's no evading from the police, which is a shame. This makes the game a bit too arcadey for some.
Online is where it gets more fun as players are much more unpredictable with driving and strategy. I haven't been playing much on it though but I am very inpressed with it.
To me they could have done a little bit better on the career modes but it is still a better title since Most wanted. Either way you'll be better off buying the console version as I said.

Let me make it clear that this is a review for the PC version of this game, as I stupidly thought it might be better to use a Logitech G25 racing wheel to play it.** How wrong I was.
I can not recommend you buy this game if you wish to play it on your PC using a wheel, if you have an xbox controller for your PC then it's pretty much like playing it on a xbox anyway so read the reviews for that.

I was looking forward to this game because I loved the original Need for Speed "Hot pursuit" and "High Stakes" games made at the turn of the century. This game is nothing like those games, the theme is roughly the same but that's about it.

Where to start? Well aside from requiring an internet connection and about 8 gigs to play which isn't really a problem, the first thing that irritated me was the music (which I turned off straight away), next on the list is the sheer number of 'swhoosh' screens. I don't know how else to explain it but after you race (which we'll come to later) you unlock a car or something (pretty much every time) which means it shows you the car and swhooshes in some annoying flashing screen you have to click through. This effect is compounded by the title intro sequence, you can't skip it, pressing Esc does nothing, you have to wait, then you can press, and then it shows you a message saying "do not switch off the power whilst this icon is flashing". It does this every time and shows that the developers couldn't be bothered to tweak the game for use on a PC, it's a console game.

The graphics are good, it runs smoothly and doesn't take long to load. However all the cars handle exactly the same, they just sound different and go faster or slower. You get to pick the colour of your car before each race, and that's about the only option you do get. All the races are rolling starts.
If you brake, the car will snap into a 'drift' automatically making using a wheel pretty useless and there is no option for a manual transmission, give or take you can just hold the accelerator down for the entire race.
There are spike strips and EMP weapons... you don't need to use them though, so I don't really see the point. You can smash up the cop cars easily and perform a 'takedown' burnout style on other racers.
The AI is also a bit cheesy, for example you'll hold your nitrous down for 5 seconds and the AI cars just match your speed and then often overtake.

Overall this is probably the worst Need for Speed game I've ever played, and I've played nearly all of them ever made on a variety of platforms.
I do not understand how it's got such high reviews and a 'Best of E3' award. I would imagine that if you're 10yrs old and play it on an xbox you might enjoy it but on a PC? No chance.
If you use a driving wheel on your PC go and buy something like Test Drive Unlimited, it is so much better.

**If you happen to have a G25 or Logitech wheel or other PC wheel it's likely you will need to create a special 'profile' in windows in order to use it with this game, otherwise you get a dead zone wider than the moon.
Using logitech profiler, make a new profile for the game, go to edit - 'specific game settings' and set everything at 150% (force feedback, spring effects etc) and reduce the degrees of rotation down to 95 degrees. This will at least make the game somewhat playable.