Gamer's Rant #16: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (Criterion, 2010)
I did a finished article on this game back in January 2011 and some of this rant is going to be a reiteration of that stuff but I think my love of Criterion caused me to give the game too much credit. Bottom Line: NFS: Hot Pursuit is a mediocre game at best. The game lacks personality, there are no rivals, no interesting characters, just the omnipresent Seacrest County Police Department (SCPD) serving and protecting... their ROADS. That's it. Their ****ing roads. There is no major city in Seacrest County and other than a couple of scattered tiny settlements, a few million dollar mountain houses and a couple of major landmarks such as a cost guard base and satellite dish array there are no signs of civilization here. It's just roads... and more roads. Sure that sounds fine, it's a racing game, there has to be roads to drive on but the fact that there is nothing for the police to "serve and protect" (it actually does say that on the police cars) they seem really out of place.
The second major issue is the roads are not that fun to drive on. While I do like them better than Burnout Paradise's open route races the "tracks" which are point to point races here are just not fun to race on. They are full of annoying long sweeping curves and mountain style switch backs and when you are driving some of the fastest cars on earth and have the "need for speed" you just don't get that on a lot of the tracks when you are constantly drifting going 150 when you could be going over 200. Don't get me wrong I ain't against turns any good course needs 'em there are just too many on these tracks and you can't build speed. These curves are also effected by the game's handling engine... the drifting mechanic feels weird. The cars generally handle very stiffly and react slowly to steering commands. In other words you have to hold the stick full right or full left for a second or so before the car start to be effected by the commands. It makes dodging things at the speeds the game travels more difficult then it needs to be. Then the drifting, because of the sluggish reactions of the controls you tend to over-steer your drifts and scrub off more speed than you need too because you felt the car was not responding. I really don't understand why Criterion felt the need to "Need for Speed" the controls so much when the "darty and dodgy" controls of their previous games were near perfect.
Next up: too many ****ing time trials. Criterion's time trials are a point of contention in all their games... from controller spiking burning laps in Burnout 3 / Revenge to some insane Burning Routes in Paradise they have a notorious history. Let me explain; Criterion's time trials are annoying because they fall into two categories: Perfects and Pathetics. In perfects, you have to be pretty much be perfect to get the gold medal and even so you still have to maintain good speed throughout to beat the goal time by a second or two... then there are the "pathetics" these runs are usually a joke you can crash three times and bounce off the walls all over the place and still beat the gold time by 5 - 10 seconds... a little balance would be nice. Here's the catch in NFS: HP, the racer events are like that 100%... the cop events give penalties of 2 seconds (wall hits) and 3 seconds (traffic car hits) on top of the speed or time you lost from screwing up in the first place. It makes you feel tentative and hesitant to drive fast, the thing is you are still racing the clock... it's about as fun as it sounds.
To sum up the Hot Pursuits events are the best races in the game for both the cops and the racers as it's a great battle to either win and escape or stop those damn street racers from defiling your precious roads with their need for speed. Everything else is pretty boring and generic actually. Autolog is a cool feature but only if you got a bunch of friends to compete against and even so they have to be playing the game at any given time. I really don't think it is enough to replace actual gameplay events with unless as I said you happen to have a bunch of friends and all you do is play Hot Pursuit. It's not Criterion's best effort which is why they are basically remaking Paradise as a NFS game with Most Wanted a game which I am pretty excited for. I think I feel better now... I had to get that out of my system, but hey, it got me to come out retirement.
The Future
I am back and I am ready to cover some stuff. I might have a "what I have been doing summary" in the next few days and I wrote a couple Top 10 lists in the time I was away that I should probably share with you guys. As for NLID... we are on the brink of gaming's busy season with game's like NHL 13 and Borderlands 2 hitting around a month and then you have NFS: Most Wanted, Halo 4, Black Ops II, Resident Evil 6, FarCry 3 and Forza Horizon so I don't think it will be back this year but I will probably continue it as soon as possible once things cool down on the gaming front. That should cover it, check back in a few days and I will have another blog ready to go covering in summary what I was doing during my "retirement". Talk to you then. OH YEEAH! Now Loading is back! Loading Complete!