Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is the series' return to what it always did best: chases between luxury supercars and police vehicles on wide country roads. Criterion, the makers of Burnout, took over the license and brought their sense of speed and destruction to it. The game is split into two careers. As a racer you flee from patrols; as a cop you have to stop them instead. Both sides have a set of gadgets activated with the d-pad: spike strips across the road, an EMP that targets the nearest vehicle, a jammer, and on the police side also calling in reinforcements or a helicopter.

The driving model is arcade but with pleasant weight. Cars are heavy, drifts need correcting, and at speeds over three hundred kilometers an hour every oncoming truck is a deadly serious matter. A key innovation was the Autolog system, which continuously compared your times with friends' times and prompted you right in the menu to beat them. It was one of the first genuinely clever attempts to connect solo play with social competition, and many later games borrowed the idea.

The open countryside you drive through is very effective: mountain passes, desert stretches, forests, and coastline, plus varying times of day and weather. On Xbox 360 it ran smoothly, and the edge blur at full throttle gives the speed a tangibility the game really needs. The audio is exceptionally aggressive, whether it's the roar of engines, crunching sheet metal, or the police radio, whose lines are among the most memorable elements of the game. Critics received the title as the best Need for Speed in a long time, and commercially it was a big success. Today it belongs among the racing games you can turn on for twenty minutes and walk away satisfied. The cop-versus-racer showdown remains, moreover, one of the few ideas the series built on repeatedly, and every time it hit exactly what most players actually want from Need for Speed.