A few days after the tenth birthday of the original title, it hits the shelves Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, certainly one of the most popular chapters of the series, but which in a certain sense proved to be particularly controversial. This new version shines the product under the graphics, but has not exempted from proposing some small innovations, more than welcome but not revolutionary. Of course, we are not facing a new chapter in the series, but just a year after the release of NFS Heat could be a good way to pass the time waiting for new challenges. Are you ready to go back to Seacrest County to do good and bad weather with your driving skills?
The Good, the Bad and the others
As expected, being a simple remastered and not a remake, the changes made to the game were mostly technical and visual. Basically we are faced again with the eternal struggle between the speed-loving "criminals" on the run, and the police trying to catch them in every way. However, as the incipit makes clear to us, the SCPD is not a team like the others, and they are willing to play with the same cards as those they are chasing: here is that even the police cars will be equipped with gadgets capable of disturb or damage the drivers, but above all they will have real racing cars available to keep up with them. The game structure is divided into missions, grouped in various areas of the map, and with the possibility of choose at our discretion when to play as a pilot in full swing, or a police cadet ready to make a career. Clearly, the number of cars at the beginning will be limited, also based on the type, and the only way to unlock them will be by obtaining experience (increasing your size) and results on the track.
The missions will be of different types depending on your "role": if you are the "bad guy", you will have to carry out races against other cars, and in the meantime escape from the police and dribble the roadblocks, but also perform timed races where your medal will be awarded to you based on your record. If, on the other hand, you run as an agent, you will discover the other side of the coin, chasing suspicions to smash the car, interrupting the races in progress, putting the drivers out of the way, or running wildly (as in time trials) to get to the point A to point B as quickly as possible, but with every collision with walls or cars that will inflict a penalty (we are the law after all). Apart from a decent "restoration" of theAutologous and some features dedicated to online, there are not many new features that make the game attractive.
Sun and storm
With a car park that is not too varied and a barely sufficient number of cars, we can at least say that the quality of the revisitation of the latter has undoubtedly been a success. Graphically speaking, in fact, our racing cars know how to tell their story, and the photo mode in the race or in the garage also allows you to enrich our personal album with pretty good shots. As for the settings, however, the leap forward was less marked, but at least passable and able to give good feedback. The only complaint we feel about water splashes when running in the wet and in the rain, which could make it much better (we underline that the version we tested is the PS4 one).
In terms of driving we are not faced with no kind of revolution: driving is pleasant and able to adapt to the car we are controlling, relying on the horsepower of the most powerful cars, or streamlining the driveability of rear-wheel drive racing cars. However, we do not deny that to find your size, especially if you are used to recent arcade racing titles, it will take some warm-up races to adapt to the responsiveness of the game controls. We are not facing the Need for Speed of the century, nor a wealth of important new content. This Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is above all a good repaint, a nostalgic excuse to go back to speeding on the streets of Seacrest County between roadblocks and spiked strips, which to be honest can turn out to be a great pastime for unpretentious fun. Could it be the prelude to something more important to come?
