Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered brings back Criterion Games' celebrated 2010 take on the series, rebuilt by Stellar Entertainment with enhanced visuals, cross-platform multiplayer and all of the original's main DLC. The premise is simple and still brilliant: every road in Seacrest County is a contest between racers who want to get away and cops who want to stop them, and you get to drive for both sides.
Two Careers, One County
The single-player career runs racers and the police side by side, and each plays like its own game. As a racer you are flat out on coastal highways, mountain passes and desert straights, earning nitrous by drifting, threading oncoming traffic and skimming past near misses. As a cop you drive interceptor versions of the same exotic cars, and the job turns from going fast to closing the net. Every event pays out in Bounty, which unlocks new cars, weapons and equipment on both sides of the law, so there is always another pursuit pulling you forward.
Tactical Weaponry on Both Sides
- Interceptor Equipment
- Cops can drop spike strips behind them, lock on with an EMP, call in roadblocks ahead of a fleeing suspect and request a helicopter to track a target from above. Using them well means planning the bust several corners ahead, not just ramming at top speed and hoping for a takedown.
- Racer Countermeasures
- Racers carry spike strips and EMP of their own, plus a jammer that scrambles police electronics and a turbo boost for breaking clear of a closing net. Timing a counterattack at the right moment is often the difference between a clean escape and a wrecked car at the side of the road.
Autolog and Cross-Platform Multiplayer
Autolog was the feature that defined Hot Pursuit on release, and it still sits at the heart of the game. It tracks your friends' times across every event, posts results to the Speedwall and recommends challenges based on what they have just done, so beating a friend's time becomes a running rivalry rather than a one-off race. The remaster adds cross-platform sync and new multiplayer gameplay, so those rivalries and head-to-head races and pursuits work whichever platform your friends play on.
What the Remaster Adds
- All of the original's main DLC is included from the start, adding around six hours of extra gameplay and more than 30 additional challenges to the career, so the full Seacrest County experience is there from your first drive.
- Enhanced visuals bring the game up to date for today's hardware, giving the sun-bleached coastline, dense forests and the gleam of the supercar roster the sharper presentation the original's chases always deserved.
- New wraps and car colors, an updated photo mode and gallery, fewer hard stops and a range of quality-of-life updates make the whole package smoother and more rounded than it was back in 2010.
A Criterion Classic, Back on the Road
Hot Pursuit was Criterion's first turn at Need for Speed after Burnout, and you can feel that lineage in every aggressive takedown and every high-speed escape. Stellar Entertainment, founded by former Criterion staff and also behind Burnout Paradise Remastered, has handled the remaster with clear respect for what made it work. If you have never played it, this is the version to start with. Choose your first car, decide which side of the law you want to begin on, and see how long your friends' times survive once you hit Seacrest County.
