Need for Speed Hot Pursuit

With an outstanding 1.49 gigabytes just in the demo, i had high hopes for the new need for speed. Very high hopes. And along with this, it was created by Criterion games, who are also the ‘burnout’ series creators – which happens to be one of my favorite games to date.

But what is wrong with the game? 

Criterion games have done something no developers have done before – they added spikes, blockades, helicopters and whatever else you can do into races that shouldn’t have that kind of thing in them!
Lets face it, the racing in the new Need for Speed has no differences to racing on Grand Theft auto 4, except the places you can go are severely limited!

A few other problems are that i expected a similar ‘combat’ system as was in burnout, however instead gamers were given a health bar above the car, which looks like a cheap arcade game. I thought they would of realized after years of racing games, that giving vehicles health bars is a bit of a bad idea.

What is right with it then? 

It is quite a good, enjoyable, new, experience of gaming that i haven’t seen before, and it has a lot of things you can do. For the first 30 minutes. After that, racing for experience points so you can get somewhere else just feels like a labor more than a  game, although the concept amazes you at the same time.

Want my advice Criterion games? Go back to Burnout, make the something close to the third or forth ones again with improved graphics, the same/similar maps, cars and features, then leave it at that until you think of some way of actually redefining the car racing genre.