When criterion first took over the need for speed franchise I was very optimistic about the future, they had just come off of burnout paradise improved that they could do large open world games. hot pursuit was a retooling of an original idea from early on in the need for speed series but featured modern everything and the all new Autolog. It was never my favourite game in the series but with the remaster I had hoped it might have changed and grown on me the result is a little complicated.

Now this is a remaster of the original release which means all the content is the same career progression online multiplayer just with more refined visuals and minor tweaks here and there. the career is still divided up into two sides, racer and police, giving you options for how you want to proceed through it. Regardless of which option you choose the career progression is basically the same, as you undertake different events you earn points, bounty for both side, collect enough and you level up. Between the levels as you earn bounty you will unlock more cars which you can then use in more events to earn more bounty it is a very cyclical system and it works. As you level up as a racer your bounty level increases which means the police will be more aggressive when trying to take you down on the flip side when you are a police officer you get access to more cars and such.

My issue with the gameplay is simply that it feels like a checklist rather than an experience, all of the events that you can enter either on the side of the racer or the police are highlighted on the map and you simply navigate to the location and then once selected a list appears of options available. Even though some of the races can be quite long and demand a lot of attention, being forced out of it back into the checklist loses any flow the game may have had and it never manages to capture any again. There is a free roam mode available, so you can take any of the cars you've unlocked and hit the streets and drive, but there is nothing to do apart from drive; there's no races to find, no speed records to set, it's just an open world completely devoid of anything to do.

The games really only saving grace is Autolog and it works just as well here as it did when it first released, each time you complete a race, you can see where you place on the Speedwall and where you stack up against your friends. Autolog is such an intrinsic part of the experience that it is literally has its own separate option on the main menu, so rather than having to navigate the map and the checklists, you can just see who's beating you on what track and you jump straight back in and try and beat them back. Other need for speed games have had similar things since but this was the originator of the concept and at no point does it ever get bogged down in superfluous options it is just who beat you and do you want to race and try take back first place.

Something new for this iteration of the game is that it does offer crossplay, meaning anytime you can be racing against people on PC, PlayStation, Xbox or Switch, which does increase the player base. Something odd that happened for me is every time I tried to boot into the game initially, it would ask me if I wanted to enable crossplay, it's not something turned on by default, selecting yes crashed the game and it did it a few times. Finally I guessed this had to be the only thing going wrong, so I selected no and it preceded on, but then I could go into the settings and turn it back on manually, weird little thing but there you go. The only way to know if you've been racing against somebody on a different platform is that it has the platform icon next to their name, even on your own name it displays the platform you are playing on, so play on PlayStation see the PlayStation icon and so on.

Looking things on the presentation side, it's a very well-done remaster, the menus all look identical to when the game was first released, so don't expect anything new there. In terms of everything else, all the assets have been improved, but this also highlights one of the more common mistakes that remasters present, and it's more to do with the world than the cars. Because the detail in the textures is so much clearer, it is now possible to see the lines between textures on sharper edges, and while you generally won't notice this when you're racing at 220 kilometres down the road, slow down a little bit and you will see. The visual effects are pretty solid, Sparks debris and such all look and move pretty well, basically the game is very pretty but it's not going to knock your socks off and a lot of the work can be attributed to the initial design done by Criterion.

One of the issues that I had with the game initially was to do with the soundtrack, I didn't like it then and I don’t like it now, it is a mix of songs that just do not feel right and having them blast at you when you're trying to race, at least for me was very off putting. Once I muted the music I was able to enjoy the sounds of the cars and the world and just get lost in what the game was presenting, it wasn't a moment of Zen, it was just enjoyable. I will say though the opening song, having to hear that each and every time I boot into the game, was annoying like nothing else, being able to choose a different song or playing a random song would have made opening the game much easier and again it comes back to song choice being not for me.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered is an easy recommendation for fans of the series, and while Autolog is an impressive a system, this honestly feels like a massive step back after last year's Need for Speed Heat. I'm not talking in terms of presentation, there is only so much you can do with a remaster, the core gameplay feels dated, and while racing is smooth and fun at times, everything else is not. If you have fond memories of the original release, then this is a worth a revisit, but if you’re newer to the series, and you see and you Need for Speed on the shelf, you might want to think twice.