Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Review (8/10)

Need For Speed certainly hasn't had an illustrious history since moving into the world of free-roaming, a fact that's eminently visible in the franchise spiralling downwards ever since Carbon. Enter Criterion Games, the makers of the hit Burnout racing series of which the most recent instalment was the excellent Burnout: Paradise (8.5/10). In Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, we get a title that's much improved over its predecessors, harkening back to the glory days of the original 1990s racer while feeling relatively fresh in the console race. Players get the option to play as either cop or robber in high-speed tournaments across a huge cityscape, but these chases feel less open than Paradise (a god-send given how easy it was to go off course there), and boast more visual flair from the splendidly outrageous car selection and even more destructible environments on offer. The actual plot of the campaign mode is pretty thin, admittedly, but everytime NFS has attempted to go 'deep' before the rest of the game-play experience has suffered for it, so this drawback is actually quite welcome. Online is definitely where Hot Pursuit is at, and I should mention that if you tend to go solo in video gaming then this really isn't the racer for you (try Forza or Gran Turismo). Hot Pursuit is easily the best Need For Speed yet, but that Criterion has already produced a near-perfect predecessor in Paradise makes this hard to recommend if you picked up the 2008 game as little has really changed, and though it's a brilliant racer there's nothing much you've not seen before in racing. Work out whether you intend to go online first!