Back to its white-knuckled roots.

The Need for Speed series has produced better lap times as of late. Their last offering, NFS Shift took the series in a new direction, but the sim style, track racing design left gamers wanting more than just another racer. The series has always prided itself on delivering some incredible backdrops and white-knuckled sharp turns, and while NFS Shift was brilliant, it wasn't what the fans of the series wanted. Since the Underground, kit building, Fast and the Furious niche has gone the wayside, it was smart for the developers to bring back the basics and just play a nice game of chase for a while. Who better to bring heart pounding racing action than the team who delivered such excitement with the Burnout series? Instead of building another game from the ground up and experimenting, Criterion Games did the smart move and brought back a fan favorite that has been gone from this world for far too long...Need for Speed Hot Pursuit.

This isn't a game for gear heads mind you, no tweaking, no gear changing, no car improvements to earn (other than the ones spoon fed to you), it's all about pick the best car for the track that is fast, kicks ass, and gets the job done. There are oodles of licensed cars to choose from that will make any car enthusiast jump for joy. All the best cars from Mazda, Ford, Chevy, and Honda are here, along with more exotic cars from Lamborghini, Maserati, Porsche, and Audi. What's more, I'm not talking about just the racers that will allow you to get from point A to B in a heartbeat, but the police get altered versions of these cars as well. That's right I said police! Not only can you play as a racer earning bounty points running from the law, but you can be the law and enforce your own brand of justice on the roadways.

While the game allows you to perform lap time events and online racing, the meat of the game is the exhausting career mode that you can choose to play both as the racer and the cops in the same career. This is nice as it helps to break up the monotony of just racing or chasing as you can alternate at anytime during the career without jumping in and out of the mode itself. After racing each event, depending on lap times and completed objectives, you will be awarded not only with new places to race, but sometimes new hardware to race with. If you are running from the law you will acquire things like spike strips, radar busters, and more to bypass those pesky police and their band of road blocks and pursuits. If you are the police, you also earn cool car stopping goodies that will allow you to take down those speedy jerks and bring law and order back to the streets. The Autolog feature in the game will not only tell you your next objective, but also how your friends are doing in their own careers as well. This also adds more objectives to your career as you now will have your own friend's times to try and undo in the course of the game as an added bonus. Granted, you don't have to beat these times to progress the career, but they give you more bang for your buck.

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is drop dead gorgeous to look at and captures the look of sunny California to a T. The game runs at a ridiculous speed and never chugs or loses frame rate no matter what is going on in the game. Oddly enough, the only time I noticed that it dipped was during the intros of the tracks themselves, but during the game play itself it is smooth as butter. The car models look fantastic and take a nice bit of damage as well. A la Burnout, there are some fantastic crash cut scenes that show the impact of the head on collisions that look both beautiful and painful at the same time. What else would you expect from Criterion Games but this show of beautiful destruction right? The menu and navigation screens are easy to view and make your progressions accordingly and never become confusing, while still looking stylish and flashy. There is even a photo mode that allows you to either snap a quick shot on the fly, or pause the game for a more artsy shot to show off to your friends and fellow gamers. With tons of things that fly by, from weather effects to brilliant crashes, this little feature allows you to just sit back and admire the beauty that you may have missed during game play.

Speaking of game play, this is the area of the game that really excels as not only do you feel as if you have full control of your speed machine at all times, but the CPU A.I. doesn't feel cheap or rubber band like so each race comes down to straight up skill and is varied from race to race as nothing is thankfully predetermined. What's more, the handling of each car feels completely different, requiring you to really have to think about the car you choose each event. The trial and error of each car can mean not only the difference in seconds shaved off your lap time, but getting that crucial time to achieve a gold to move onto the next progression level, so chose wisely.

There is very little not to like about NFS: Hot Pursuit when all is said and done. The game looks great, handles fantastically, is fast as hell, and has a large amount of licensed cars. You can also be the cops or the wanted drivers, you have tons of weapons and equipment at your disposal to evade or take down the other drivers, and the career is extremely long and can be played from both perspectives simultaneously. Honestly, what's not to love here? If you want to tweak your gear box, get Gran Turismo 5, if you want to race and get hand cramps while doing so at blistering speeds, than Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is just the game for you. Welcome back the speed in Need for Speed....we missed you.