Remember when Need for Speed was about racing down the open road in an open-top exotic whilst evading the police rather than who has the most tasteless body kit? Of course you don’t, because the last half a decade or so has seen the once unbeatable racing franchise begin to rust as each iteration became progressively low in quality.
Thankfully, last year saw a turning point with Need for Speed Shift, a thoroughbred track racer that started the restoration process. I rather liked it, too, yet I was still longing for that classic, awe-inspiring Need for Speed experience I grew up with: I even went as far as pleading for a new Hot Pursuit game at the end of my Shift review last year.
Mercifully it seems that someone out there was listening, as here I am, over a year later, playing the rebranded Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (the first game in the series to bear the Hot Pursuit subtitle in eight years), with development duties this time handed to the talented creators of Burnout, Criterion Games. The bonkers Burnout series remains a firm favourite of mine as well, so the prospect of Need for Speed merging with Burnout was positively salivating to say the least. After all, if there’s one developer that’s up for the task of rebooting Need for Speed, it’s surely Criterion: the chase is on.
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