Thread: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Multiplayer Hands-On

Cops and racers are the gaming world's cats and dogs--they're violently antagonistic towards each other, and it's never good to have them both in the same room. This long-held animosity will be the focus of UK studio Criterion's first stab at the Need for Speed franchise--Hot Pursuit--and follows up from its much-lauded work on Burnout Paradise two years ago. Criterion and publisher EA recently showed off the main competitive multiplayer mode for Hot Pursuit at a pre-TGS 2010 event, and we managed to get behind the wheel as both a speedy racer and a dogged cop to play out this classic struggle yet again on the open roads.


The game's titular Hot Pursuit mode sees you either as a racer or a cop. Your goal as a racer is to make it to the end point first by taking whatever roads (or shortcuts) are quickest, while cops need to hunt down and destroy all racer vehicles. Eight players will be able to compete online, with both types of drivers having access to a suite of four power-ups that will assist in your quest to escape or to detain.

We chose the law for the first few runs of our demo session, with our team of four cop cars having to run down a similarly sized squad of racers. Bringing down racers requires you to damage their vehicles enough to the point of breakdown, which you can either do by ramming into them, by forcing them into barricades, or by making them crash into other cars. Assisting you in this task are four power-ups--an EMP blast, road spikes, support helicopter, or road blocks. Calling in a road block will see a group of police vehicles and barricades set up in front of a racer, with only a minor gap in the wall to drive through. Spikes will similarly give racers plenty of steering hassles, as deploying them will see spikes stretch out across most of the width of a road, with only the edges free from the tire-damaging power-ups. Helicopters act like spikes on steroids--calling in one of these supports will see a chopper hover ahead of a racer, dropping road spikes for a set amount of time. The EMP will scramble a targeted racer's driving controls and is the only power-up that will require you to be in sight of your quarry to use. When you first deploy an EMP, a target reticle will appear onscreen, and you'll need to keep your chosen racer in your sights for a few seconds before the EMP hits. Choosing one of these power-ups to deploy is as simple as pressing a direction on the D pad, but some powers can't be stacked (such as the helicopter)--that is, two or more police choppers can't be in the air at once, which means you'll need to liaise with your fellow police officers to make sure you're using that chopper at the best time.

its a great game to play on nintendo wii

Just another NoS title.. Lost the fun of each of the games since a long time, I doubt anythign will change with that new game.

I'm eagerly waiting for its release in my country.. I believe the graphics will be of much higher level when compare to previous version !!

Originally Posted by jeanorwin

Just another NoS title.. Lost the fun of each of the games since a long time, I doubt anythign will change with that new game.

Agreed. These were fun years ago but they stopped progressing. Just graphic changes now.

I dont see the point in always higher graphics by the way. The graphics are fine as they are, I doubt that games will sell more often because they push more graphics in it. It just means you gotta buy a new PC.

i cant stand serrious games on the wii i only like playing mario and pokemon and wii sports ! lol

Lol, whats different about this one? They're all the same now...
Mario kart wii is the ONLY racing game i allow to be even put into my wii.

This game was one of the best racing games ever!!

I had so much fun playing this game. I could not stop and neither could any of my friends that I played it with.