 Need for Speed's back in action! Seacrest County is home to some of the most elite street-racers in the world. To describe these cars as "fast" would be a severe understatement. Fortunately, the police have upped the ante with their new arsenal. Cop or racer, you decide...
1. Gameplay
Recently, racing games have been breaking that mold. Blur and Split/Second both added an element of strategy that hasn’t been present in a real racing game in quite some time. Hot Pursuit, however, blows them both out of the water.  As momentum meets inertia, cars meet sky. Instead of simply trying to get to the finish line before the other racers, players are now tasked with ensuring they don’t get wrecked while wrecking other players. If you have ever played the Burnout series, you’ll know what this game is like (this game was made by the same company that made Burnout). Wrecking isn’t as easy as in Burnout, but the amount of tools you have at your disposal means that you’ll definitely have some fun trying to take out both cops and racers. The strategy goes beyond just calling in roadblocks. Racers tend to have more defensive abilities, such as turbos and radar jammers. Cops tend to have more offensive abilities, such as helicopters (that move forward and drop spike strips) and EMPs.  Protected and Served. The campaigns, multiplayer, and DLCs alone would have given this game a 9, yet there’s one extra feature the developers added in that pushed my rating to a 10. The game includes a “photo mode”, in which the player can pause the game mid-race and take full, high-resolution pictures of the action. It’s a subtle addition that means players can show off their best busts to all of their friends in high enough resolution to make an awesome desktop wallpaper. This is the best racing game I’ve played in a long, long time. Welcome back, Need for Speed.
The multiplayer game mode is a lot of fun to play, and definitely would extend the life of the game as well. It may not be as popular as Black Ops’ multiplayer, but there are enough players online to keep a racer busy for some time.
Cops, however, have an added difficulty. If they hit a wall, they get two seconds added onto their time for every collision. If they hit a civilian vehicle, three seconds are added on. This may seem relatively straight forward, but the times that are set into place for the gold basically require the player to be going at close to top speed at all times. It is extremely difficult to avoid every wall and every bit of traffic at those speeds. To compound the difficulty, the traffic in the game is not fixed. The cars are randomly placed around the level at the beginning of the race. So in one race you may find two cars blocking your path, but upon restarting the same race the cars will be in a different location. It makes it very difficult to keep a steady time since you’re constantly on the watch for traffic.  Near misses are common. Very common. The other frustrating thing is the lack of players on the two DLC multiplayer game modes. It’s understandable since gamers have to pay 560 Xbox Gamer Points, which roughly equals $7, and all they get is two multiplayer game modes. It’s difficult to justify spending $7 when there is little incentive for players to try those new game modes. It should have been a free DLC or included in one of the other DLCs. 2. Parental Notices
The only extra piece I would make note of is that there are civilian cars in the game. The player is able to crash into these cars, but the game’s design heavily discourages the players from doing this. It's hard to win races if the player's car is a smoking wreck on the side of the road.  Another one bites the dust...
3. Other Factors
 Turning the tables... Even with the obvious anti-law bias for the racers, the game does not encourage only anti-law behavior. The game includes a full cop campaign in which the only assignment (with few exceptions) is to bust all of the racers. The player in the cop campaign is an overpowered wrecking machine. Higher-level races will have the player almost single-handedly take out as many as seven racers. Players who become experienced can take out all seven racers in less than a few minutes.  Race shutdown. The side that the player prefers will tend to be based on the player’s style. I love the idea of having the power to call in road blocks and helicopters in an effort to shut down law-breakers. Other players enjoy the idea of escaping the law. Either way, it’s all good, clean fun.
 It's always nice to have a few friends. The only problem I’ve found is in the way the multiplayer is set up. There are five tiers of cars. The newest players are only able to play the first few tiers since the rest of the cars are locked. However, the lack of players means that there are rarely players on the higher tiers. So the higher-leveled players go down to the lower tiers to play. It makes it difficult for players who have little experience with the cars. However, since most of the races are technically team (cops vs racers) the new players are still able to win as long as their team wins. It balances out nicely and, while I’m sure it’s frustrating for the players who lag behind and thus get annihilated by the cops, they gain valuable experience, both in experience points in the game and in tactics that they can apply later on.
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