Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2

From the moment you see the opening cinematic video for NFS, you get the feeling you're in for a wild ride. A nice interface, superb soundtrack, and two large campaign modes all set the stage to get anyone excited about this racing game. But does the excitement stay?

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II for the GameCube offers a bevy of nicely designed and nicely presented environment’s to race in. Circuits are nice and long, and there’s plenty of scenery to gaze at while driving in the many beautiful locales. Car models are also respectively true to their originals, with high poly counts, and for once - in a licensed car racing game – car damage modeling! But NFS’s looks can be deceiving. On further inspection, you’ll notice that textures appear a little grainy, and the overall appeal of the graphics suffer badly from a slow framerate. To add to all this, the replay option is terrible. It’s ultimately the same view you had, except with the ability to increase and decrease speed. And for some unexplainably odd reason, the Ps2 version doesn’t suffer from a weak framerate, grainy textures, and it comes complete with an adequate replay option. In fact, both versions bearing the same name were developed by two completely different developers. Which is very odd, and in this case, a bad idea.

The game offers players 2 career modes, Hot Pursuit and Champion:

Hot Pursuit, is where you battle certain goals like beating a certain time, or delivering a car to a specific location on time, while dealing with the police. The police will send out cops if you speed past them, if you continue chase, they’ll increase they’re effort to pull you over. They will send out faster police cruisers, more cruisers, set up road blocks, lay spike strips, and even summon a helicopter that will drop explosives in your path.

Champion Mode plays exactly like the Hot Pursuit mode, except the law will not be present as you tear up the roads, giving you only your competitors to worry about, no bomb dropping helicopters here.

On top of the already mentioned excellent soundtrack - featuring roughly a dozen licensed tracks (Including Rush, Bush, Uncle Cracker and many more) – Need for Speed has some pretty good overall audio too. The voice acting for the police officers are excellent and sound convincing, and explosions to tires popping are spot on as well. However, the vehicle sounds do sound fairly weak, especially in comparison to the Ps2 version. A lot of the engine noises are whinny and too similar, and don’t have distinctive sounds.

Control layout is appropriate, it won’t take long before you adjust to the controls. But the actual vehicles handle awkwardly. Mainly due to unresponsive controls and flawed driving physics. You’ll find your car flipping more than expected, and it will take you some valuable time to get back on track if you slam into a car. There is however the Z button, pressing the Z button will reset your car and drop it back on track, in case you start to roll out of control, or get stuck somewhere.

Overall, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is it’s first appearance on a Nintendo platform, and a fair one too might I add. It isn’t the driving simulator you might have wanted, but it doesn’t aim to be that either. It’s a suitable arcade-style racer that will entertain you and some friends for a while. If you’re a fan of the series, then I would definitely recommend picking this title up, get the Playstation 2 version if possible.

NFS is a decent racing experience. It has its flaws, but it has some strong points too. It could have been much better, with the proper care, as the Ps2 version proves evident.