I’ve played most of the Burnout series and have really enjoyed them, so it’s only natural that I’d want to try Hot Pursuit, since it was made by the same development team. This is actually the first NFS game I’ve played, so I wasn’t able to compare against previous NFS or Hot Pursuit games.

For the most part NFSHP definitely plays like a Burnout game, but the car handling here feels a bit less arcade-y. Not saying it leans more towards a driving sim, but you can definitely feel subtle differences between the cars. Speaking of the vehicles, they look gorgeous, and I’m playing this in 2019, almost a decade after the game was first released. The terrains and environments look amazing as well.

In career mode, you can play as a racer or a cop. I definitely found racer events to be more fun. Cop events were mostly “let me get this out of the way so I can progress” affairs for me. Interceptor events in particular can be downright infuriating, where you’re trying to take down a single racer. It doesn’t sound so bad, until you get hit by the rubberbanding and sudden 180 turns, it’s hair-pulling stuff. Cop cars also have this annoying siren, which you cannot turn off… or so I thought until I read the manual after I finished the game, where I found out you can disable the siren by holding triangle. RTFM people! I also thought the cop cars look pretty ugly with the stickers all over them. Oh and helicopters are pretty much useless. So basically:

Having said all that, playing Hot Pursuit mode as a cop is arguably my favourite event type. It feels damn good when you’re wrecking racers one by one.

The last event of the game is Seacrest Tour, a 70km endurance race which will take around 13 to 15 minutes to finish. I lost count of the number of times I finished 4th, the rubberbanding is ridiculous in the last few kilometres. Watching this video afterwards made me feel even worse about myself:

I found the game to be quite challenging. I got mostly silvers and bronzes when completing events. Luckily bronze is all you need to progress, so it didn’t bother me too much when I didn’t get gold, but if you’re a completionist, you’ll definitely have your work cut out for you.