Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit – review

In generations to come, when futuristic space children put their hands up in class and ask, "what was the first truly 21st century arcade racing game?" the answer they'll receive from their robot teachers will be Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

While the under-rated Blur dabbled in social networking functionality and Disney's showy Split/Second revelled in cutting edge automotive destruction, it is Criterion's game that successfully fuses those elements together into one exhilarating ride.

The action takes place in the fictitious coastal country of Seacrest, where petrol-head nutjobs are engaged in turbo-charged battle with the traffic cops. Through a series of unlockable events and challenges, players swap between the two sides, earning points and unveiling shiny new vehicles as they go.

One minute you'll be competing in a four-car Hot Pursuit, angling for first place as the cops attempt to shunt you all off the road; the next you'll be in a squad car on an Interceptor mission, desperately trying to smash boy racers into trackside barriers. As you progress, more areas of the map open up, each offering a range of new missions – including against-the-clock time trials, duels against single enemies and the mouth-watering preview sessions where you get to try out scorching hot exotics like the McLaren F1 and Pagani Zonda Roadster ages before you're able to unlock them for real.

Typically for a Criterion racer, players are free to attempt unlocked events in any order they like. Racers get a gold, silver or bronze medal at the end of each task depending on their performance, while cops get a distinction, merit or pass – so there's always room to come back and try for a better rating if you've only just scraped through. Better still, connect the console to the net and the game monitors all of your Xbox Live or PSN friends, showing your best times against theirs and letting you know when a pal performs better.

The neat "Autolog Recommends" mode also picks out key times achieved by mates and lets you go straight in to challenge them; this creates a beautifully seamless sense of competitive multiplayer action, even if you're never all online at the same time.

But if you do manage a synchronised cyberspace get-together, Hot Pursuit really comes alive. Via a vast range of customisable race options, drivers can engage in thrilling multiplayer road fights, ranging from straight-up eight-car races to four-vs-four challenges, where police squads face racer gangs.

The latter are just ridiculously enjoyable. Cops must work together to shut down racers, while the racers themselves are competing for first place while occasionally teaming up to see off squad cars. The perfectly judged power-up system provides both sides with spike strips that can be dropped to pop the tyres of pursuers, as well as electromagnetic pulse systems that target vehicles just ahead of you with a system-crashing boost of energy.

The police also get to call in road blocks and helicopter support, while racers get a one-off turbo boost that sends their vehicles scorching into hyperspace. These power-ups can also be gradually unlocked through the career mode, and they add a hugely satisfying competitive twist to the events. They're not as visually captivating as the weapons in Blur or WipEout HD, or as entertainingly destructive as the scenic special moves in Split/Second, but they're certainly better balanced and less intrusive, providing an augmentation to good, solid driving rather than a scene-stealing get-out-last-place-free card for slow coaches.

This certainly isn't the bruising smash-happy joyride some misguided fools may expect from the catchall term "arcade racer". With a handling model that nudges in somewhere between the Burnout series and the more sim-like Need For Speed: Shift, it's a technically demanding racer that takes its array of beautiful motors seriously.

Sure, muscle cars like the Corvette ZR1 and Dodge Challenger oversteer with throbbing abandon, while the low slung exotics stick more resolutely to the surface, but there are dozens of variations in between and mastering the cornering and drifting potential of each model takes genuine skill. While you can certainly bash into rivals and grind along barriers, no one is going to wait around for you to recover – there is a touch of rubber-banding in the AI, but it never approaches the taut, springy farce of Mario Kart Wii. You need to drive, you need to grip the racing line, you need to learn the shortcuts and use them brilliantly.

And while you're learning, there are wonderful heart-stopping moments of drama and tension. What fun it is to spy, in the far distance, two rivals clipping an oncoming truck and spinning across the road in a confetti shower of shrapnel, allowing you to slip by amid the carbon fibre corpses. And how terrifying, when you scorch over the brow of a hill, only to hit a spike strip or a damaged car resting across your path.

Hot Pursuit is a game of millimetre escapes and of awesome, high-speed pile-ups that are Ballardian in their lustful depiction of splintering metal. Every environment is rendered in gorgeous HD detail giving us everything from dust-churning desert tracks, to wintry peaks, to sylvan passes along glittering lakes. Meanwhile, the lighting engine works minor miracles every time a swirling police light hits the walls of a tunnel, or the sun glints off the chassis of a Maserati Gran Cabrio scorching along the coastal freeway.

All that's missing perhaps, is the free-roaming anarchy of the Burnout series; the road layouts constructed as much for stunts and choreographed smashes as for race events. Hot Pursuit is much more conventional in that sense. But at the same time, it points the way in terms of social functionality, investing every single-player session with asynchronous multiplayer potential, and allowing cautious gamers to segue almost seamlessly into the world of online play.

Hot Pursuit, like the high-end vehicles it fetishises, has been crafted with genuine care, with great insight, with technical brilliance. Gran Turismo 5 will grab the headlines and the purist vote, but it surely won't live like this game does; it will be an austere cathedral to Criterion's joyous modernist structure.