With the arrival of the new wave of consoles, we didn’t have the time to fully check out Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered when it launched, but the Criterion masterpiece is especially deserving of our focus now as support has been added for the nex-gen consoles, opening the door to a 4K experience running at 60 frames per second. More than that, in the wake of the news that Criterion’s new Need for Speed title has been delayed, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on an astonishing run of iconic racing games from the Guildford-based developer.
It’s something I was discussing with John Linneman recently: what exactly is peak Criterion? Some might say it’s Need for Speed Hot Pursuit – a game that radically rebooted the franchise, bringing over the best of Burnout but respecting the core DNA of what made the original NFS titles so great. And then there was Autolog, of course, a remarkably successful attempt to meld social networking into a video game. But despite some remarkable coding resulting in input latency that matched or even beat some 60fps games, Hot Pursuit was a 30fps title in an era where 60fps was Criterion’s hallmark. So maybe it’s actually Burnout Paradise that’s peak Criterion? But what about the incredible Burnout 3: Takedown? Or maybe the purist’s favourite, Burnout 2: Point of Impact?
Perhaps it’s simply enough to say that from the arrival of Burnout 2 all the way through to Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Criterion was the undisputed master of the racing genre, with every game a must-buy – and in returning to what was the last truly great Criterion racing offering, it’s very much business as usual. Yes, Hot Pursuit hasn’t radically evolved visually from its PC rendition and despite running at higher resolutions and (on select formats at least) higher frame-rates than the original console versions, it’s very much a game of its era. But the bottom line is that the game still runs beautifully, the handling is sublime and the concept is to-the-point, immediate and brilliant. Perhaps best of all is the vista-like presentation: the promise of an open road that stretches far into the distance. And yes, the resolution boost definitely helps there.
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