Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit from 2010 marked the return of British studio Criterion Games, creators of the famous Burnout series, to the Need for Speed franchise and to its original concept of high-speed police chases from the mid-1990s. The game offered a strongly asymmetric multiplayer as well as a branching career, in which the player could choose either side of the law – the police or the fleeing racers – with each side using different special equipment: police used radar, spike strips, and helicopter support, while racers used jammers, EMP pulses, and turbo boosts to catch up to fleeing rivals.

The open region of Seacrest County served as the backdrop for high-speed chases in exotic cars from brands like Lamborghini, Porsche, Aston Martin, and Chevrolet Corvette, taking place on picturesque mountain switchbacks, parched desert highways, and winding coastal roads in varying weather and times of day. On PC, the game ran on an improved version of the engine from the Burnout Paradise series and offered high smoothness of motion even in dense traffic at extreme speeds, which was both the technical and the sensory peak of the arcade racing genre at the time.

Critics received the game with exceptional warmth and ranked it among the best arcade racers of its generation, with praise directed especially at the adrenaline-filled driving feel, the well-balanced asymmetric multiplayer, and the overall audiovisual presentation. The so-called Autolog system of friendly challenges also won acclaim, comparing times and achievements among players on a friends list and motivating repeated runs through the same stretches of road.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit thus became a turning point for the series, which after several weaker and less inspired entries regained the trust of both players and critics, and it is still rightly considered one of the high points of the entire long-running brand as well as one of the best arcade police chase games ever released on PC.

Why play it: For fans of arcade police chases, it's one of the high points of the entire Need for Speed series and proof that Criterion Games knew how to restore the brand's lost form.