Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered Review
A “No Frills” Throwback
My relationship with racing games is a complex thing. The first real racing game I was exposed to as a child was Gran Turismo 5 on the PlayStation 2. I thoroughly enjoyed ATV: Offroad Fury and Burnout on the PS2, Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii and DS, Midnight Club: Los Angeles on the PS3, Grand Theft Auto V on the PS4, and, most recently, the Need for Speed series on PS4.
As you can probably tell by the list, there’s a wide variety of racing games I’ve played, each with its own quirks and features that make it fun. Gran Turismo had realistic racing. Offroad Fury was inspired by the motocross craze of the early 2000s. Burnout was crafted for creating catastrophic car crashes. Mario Kart made and broke friendships with races that put you on the edge of your seat. GTA V was designed for the player who wanted to have fantastic cars and driving experiences in a chaotic, parodic sandbox world.
But Need for Speed is something else entirely. Need for Speed keeps putting out entries in an uncanny valley between strictly racing simulator games (like Gran Turismo and Forza) and customizable car games like Midnight Club and the more recent installments of Mario Kart. The first Need for Speed entry I played, Payback, featured customizable and upgradable real-world cars with a strange randomized and ranked parts game mechanic.
I liked the game for the ability to race real-world cars and so I purchased a game that came out two years prior, the 2015 edition of Need for Speed, and enjoyed it more than Payback. While the questionable attempt to blend live-action actors with video game cars was a fresh idea in the series, the game really shone with its vehicle customization and upgrade game mechanics.
When I heard one of the more lauded titles in the series was getting remastered with a clever ad campaign surrounding it, I had to check it out in the 2020 holiday season. With a retail price of $40, I had to answer the burning question on my mind: does Hot Pursuit hold up to its price tag?
Gameplay
Hot Pursuit places the player on a map of the game world with limited access to both racing vehicles and police variants of those vehicles. You have two main gameplay options to choose from: traditional racing gameplay or police takedown missions where you try to stop racers.
The most common races you’ll compete in are time trials, “VS” races where you compete with one other non-player character, and traditional multi-person races. For the police, the events are similar but have a law enforcement theme around them. As an officer, your races involve doing enough damage to a racer’s vehicle to make them stop within a certain time period, traveling at breakneck speeds to assist other officers (a time trial), or taking down multiple racers within a certain time period.
As you complete races and police busts, your level increases, as does the availability of faster cars in your garage. I favored the “racing” side of the game over the “police” side because the cars I unlocked felt so much more alive/full of whatever personality I could put into them with custom paint when compared against the dull black/blue and white police versions of the same cars.
Vehicle customization is limited to paint color and nothing else, and you have to choose your car’s color every time you want to start a race. While I appreciate the option to always choose a new color each time, the cars would have felt more personal to me if the game saved my previous color choice instead of requiring me to choose the same color over and over.
Final Thoughts
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered feels like a game from 2010. There’s nothing special or groundbreaking about its gameplay. It requires a certain level of skill to master that is seldom seen in contemporary racing games.
I found myself getting “Silver” or just “Passing” time trials on more than one occasion, and I can’t upgrade my way out of a poor lap time. The game requires you to practice and get better at it to unlock all the gold medals for all of the events.
That being said, it does exactly what it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Hot Pursuit is a game for those who want to experience racing games of the early 2010s again.
Is it worth $40? To the right person, it is. But for me, I’m unsure if I’ll pick the game up again when I have so many other games to review and enjoy. The only racing you’ll find me doing is finding faster ways to complete the recently released Cayo Perico Heist in GTA Online.
