BitSnark

Bearing a name taken from the history of it’s last gen predecessors, EA today announced that Burnout developer Criterion Games is developing Need For Speed – Hot Pursuit for release on November 19th for 360 and PS3 platforms.

Returning to the famed series’ roots, Hot Pursuit is all about being the law and escaping the law in the fastest most adrenaline infused way possible. The objective of the cop is to ram the racer off the road and wreck their car and the objective of the racer is to outpace the cop and reach the end of the race. Players can start careers as either a racer or as a cop and their career progress is tracked both in single-player mode and also online via Need For Speed ‘Autolog’.

Autolog is in many ways an evolution of the player network last seen in Burnout Paradise; player records are maintained and updated, alerts come in regarding players who have broken your records and players are notified when a ‘nemesis’ player comes online, who has beaten you in the past.

In regards to the game itself, the demo that was shown depicted a narrow forest highway track in which two players were engaged in a furious cop and racer chase. From what I could tell, the game runs off of a modified Burnout Paradise engine, with the cars, handling and crashes all being evocative of Criterion’s last motorised ballet of destruction. There didn’t appear to be many other vehicles around, but the sense of speed was certainly there and did a good job of conveying the white knuckle tension of a high-speed police pursuit.

It would have been cool to see other tracks, cars and even what modes are available, but that was all we got.

Hopefully, we’ll hear more shortly on this promising racer.

The trailer can be seen below: