While I’ve been quite positive about EA’s recent efforts, I’ve also been quite worried about how the company seems to be putting out so many Need for Speed titles that have all been met with lukewarm reception. With the release of Need for Speed: Nitro, developed totally for the Nintendo Wii, things were really starting to get better, especially since it wasn’t a title developed for HD consoles and then just forcefully pushed down into a product that would work and run on the Wii. Seeing potential in the original version of Hot Pursuit released oh-so-many years ago, EA saw it fit to reintroduce and redo the fan favourite in an attempt to garner more acclaim. And fortunately it seems that Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is one of the entries in the franchise that isn’t really all that bad, but it’s just a bit of a shame the Wii version has not received enough attention.

Graphically speaking, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit features a very, very bare bones appearance. These graphics are something you would not expect to see from a development house funded by a powerhouse such as EA, with some of the graphics from the original games on the GameCube sometimes surpassing what is rendered by this game. Vehicles are extremely bare bones with little to no detail at all, and despite this lack of proper detail on the cars, environmental effects and draw distance are still incredibly average. It’s just so disappointing to see such a low class game for a console that we all know can do much better. Cars don’t even damage properly, creating a notable lack of dynamic effects in the game and making it feel, well, lifeless. The constant blurring of the environment also highlights the lack of a true sense of speed.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is also an incredibly bare bones affair in terms of the modes and ways to play through the game. The rather bog standard Career Mode sees players racing through four major cities and then concluding their career with a “Grand Prix” track, while completing a variety of events. Each city has around four to five tracks to complete but unfortunately within each city these tracks feel largely the same. “Hot Pursuit” events see players racing through with the occasional appearance of a police car designed to punish the player should they veer off course or crash into things they’re not meant to crash into. There are other events that require players to destroy cars that are racing, beat a certain time limit and a rather unique mode in which whoever is coming last during a certain time interval is automatically knocked out of the game. All these game modes are pretty sound concepts and some of them worked pretty well with the original game, but unfortunately here it’s quite boring and the rubber banding of the AI is quite possibly some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a video game.

The biggest disappointment with Hot Pursuit, however, is the thing that would either make or break a racing game. The handling of the cars. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit never really handles the cars properly or as you’d expect them to, despite supporting three different control methods. Cars seem to be way too loose to control or sometimes feel like they are way too heavy – the handling is just all wrong. These problems are exacerbated even more when you try to drift when using the Wii Wheel, during which my cars regularly went in the complete opposite direction than what I previously intended. Wii Remote and Nunchuk support is a little bit better, although there’s something about this setup that was very uncomfortable. Finally, and most appropriately, support for the GameCube controller was the ideal control scheme – everything just felt like it worked as it should have.

Cars can also be customised in order to increase their stats and enhance their appearance, although the customisation system is relatively shallow and doesn’t help fix any of the problems to do with handling and such that I discovered during standard play. Still, the ability to customise the cars, albeit in a rather shallow way, is a nice touch.

Hot Pursuit also features a multiplayer mode with splitscreen, but this is implemented rather lazily with the frame rate dropping to abysmal levels during the affair. The only real plus side to competing with friends in splitscreen mode is that the awful AI is no longer really that much of an issue and that the various power-ups scattered across the screen add a bit more variety and much more interesting elements into the mix. Otherwise, this mode is pretty average too.

As you’d expect from any EA-published title in this genre, the soundtrack is filled with modern pop, rock and RnB songs from a variety of licensed artists. The car sounds that you’d expect to find are all here too, but the distinct lack of an announcer creates a rather boring effect for the races. I never really placed that much interest in having an announcer for a racing game but now that there isn’t one, everything feels, well, dead. It’s a case of not knowing what you’ve got till you’ve lost it.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is a largely disappointing experience that honestly feels as though the developers and publisher just wanted to put something out that resembled the original versions, without any regard for what the fans might want or what the game should actually be like. It’s very hard to recommend this to anyone who is a fan of the franchise, as developer Exient has done a disappointing job in capturing the essence of the Hot Pursuit series in this Wii rendition. I hope EA Montreal steps up to the plate next time and provides us with an experience more akin to Nitro than this. It’s probably best to avoid this one, to be honest.