NEED FOR SPEED HOT PURSUIT REMASTERED
‘Re-released’ might have been a more fitting title
The word ‘Remaster’ has become such a seal of quality recently that you could – very cynically – slap it on a decade-old game from any well-known brand, change virtually nothing, and still make a few million quid. Well, here’s Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered, and you could be forgiven for checking whether the PS3 disc has somehow managed to load up in your PS4.
The game still looks and feels ten years old. The graphics really haven’t been brushed up very noticeably at all; environments look stretched and it doesn’t run particularly smoothly – a mere 30fps at 1080p on the base PS4 (though PS4
Pro offers 4K/30fps or 1080/60fps options). If anything’s been remodelled or if object placement is more dense, you’d never know without carefully examining footage of both.
But hey, it’s still a Triple-A racer from Burnout creator Criterion, and you get to be the racers or the cops in thrilling, high-speed car chases. That’s always going to be cool. The game also notably gave the world Autolog, which in 2010 provided breakthrough online leaderboards for every event in the game, informing you when a friend beat your time, setting the template for pretty much every racer that followed. It’s still a great feature today, and now that the game supports cross-platform play, the reveal trailer’s ‘5:10’ fixation in which friends battle for supremacy on just one challenge actually isn’t far from the truth.
HOT OR NOT
But unlike Driveclub, which took this gauntlet-throwing element and ran with it, Hot Pursuit shines in offline, solo play too. As you progress and unlock weapons like spike strips, helicopter backup, jammers, and EMP blasts, things get much more involved than simply avoiding traffic on long, sweeping roads. Mastering the drift mechanics and screaming round a corner while listening to noughties emo rock is easy to enjoy, and you’ll sink into it like a nice hot bath. Or indeed, a nice hot pursuit.
While that drifting control is top-notch, the regular car handling is clumsy, which isn’t ideal when time trials penalise you two seconds for clattering into a wall. The solo time trial stages are therefore the least enjoyable, with the multiple car police pursuits being the clear highlight. The cop side gets the lion’s share of the fun as you score Burnout-style Takedowns on illegal street racers, though you can attack the fuzz when you play as the other side. The car damage is decent (though not quite Burnout level), despite licensed vehicles, which is interesting to observe.
All Hot Pursuit’s original DLC has been woven into the career mode, and there are new photo and customisation options too, so there are some minor improvements. But does it deserve the sales it’ll get based off the reputation of other, better remasters? Absolutely not.
VERDICT
The technical improvements are so minor, especially on the base PS4, you honestly might as well just play the PS3 version from ten years ago. Both are lots of fun. Justin Towell