Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Download

2010 must the big year for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. It received the Game Critics Awards of "Best Racing Game" from critics at E3 2010. Post-released, Major professional reviewers gave high praise simultaneously to the racing game. IGN gave 9.0 out of 10 and an Editor's Choice Award to the game, GameTrailers also scored 9 out of 10; and the same like Eurogamer. Who is Blur and Split/Second? Ok, though they were well-behaved in the year, but the throne of arcade-style racing games only belong to Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

For the reboot of this Need for Speed sub-series, which saw two installments across PS1 and PS2, Criterion has created a racer that not only lives up to expectations of thrilling speed and pristine visuals but blows past them with a cops-and-robbers career mode.

Right out of the gate, Hot Pursuit delivers excellent control and handling, which isn't all that surprising given this is the Burnout studio. But the game structure here is one of point-to-point races along long stretches of road and often calls for extremely precise, split-second maneuvers in order to avoid traffic, bust roadblocks or take a shortcut on what are some comparatively narrow roads. Criterion has upped the precision to suit its design, and the result just feels great.

The marquee element is allowing players to blaze through an entire career as a cop or a racer. Whichever you choose - and you can, at any time, take part in a racer event, even if you're dozens of missions into the cop "path," for example - expect a different, but equally thrilling experience. In one instance, you need to focus on avoiding traffic, threading a needle through gaps in roadblocks and generally driving as fast as possible; in the other, you're trying to ram racers until they crash and just generally being more aggressive.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit System

The system of collecting bounty points for driving well and winning races works really well, increasing your rank as either a cop or a racer, which, in turn, makes new cars (and car classes) available, along with new gadgets (helicopters that drop spike trips for the cops, jamming gear for the racers, etc.) and upgraded versions of them, too. By the end of the game, you're driving incredibly fast, exotic cars on both sides of the law and using advanced tactics to win - and the path to getting there is perfectly balanced in terms of difficulty, rewards and new locales.

There's also an excellent online component. The "Autolog" system is the key to it all, really, keeping constant track of how your friends are doing in any given event, which makes retrying races in an attempt to one-up them irresistible. Of course, then, they beat yours, and it just keeps going. Autolog provides these updates in real time, so you can be at the map pondering which event you'll tackle next and get a prompt that a friend has just bested your score somewhere. With the press of a shoulder button, you can load directly into that event and attempt to reclaim your dominance of it.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Online Experience

In addition to these automated prompts, you're able to post specific challenges for your friends to take on - say you just beat a race in under a certain time and you want to see if your friends can top it - and they'll appear in your list of event "suggestions." There's also a message board where messages and screenshots can be shared among friends, and an interesting system through which the game will recommend friends of friends to you, in order to expand the online experience.

And that's where Hot Pursuit really shines for players - the online competition. The Hot Pursuit mode itself is just fantastic when played online against (and with) real people. There's a surprisingly deep level of strategy involved, but mostly a whole lot of fun. It really is something that feels infinitely replayable; digging its hooks in and not letting you go.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit may have been a late entrant into the race, but it both grabs the checkered flag for this year and may set a land speed record for this entire class of racer.