MetalAngel wrote:
As I say, I hope to be proved wrong by playing it some more this week. But I am at controller-throwing stage with it at the moment, and so am giving it a break for today.
Certainly, moving up a level is nice, with all the new cars you've been forced to look at finally becoming available to drive. The Lamborghini Reventon police mission was something of an eye-opener as to what the later stages of the game will be like.
In many regards I can't disagree with your objections to the game and how it behaves, certainly having random traffic in the basic time trial stages is an absolute nonsense, and I got a little piqued this evening on a racer stage that was about 16.5 miles long and appeared to be wiping me out on an apparently random basis.
However, after a few retries, and honing my car choice down, and as daft as this sounds, 'learning how to deal with the randomness', I had a really good run and got through, to the extent that I could have sustained a couple of horrible unfair crashes towards the end and still won.
The rubberbanding is nothing new for Burnout, (and let's be clear, this is a Burnout game, not an NFS game, EA have just branded it to suit them), and neither are the unfair situations it chucks at you (Burnout Paradise did it but it 'felt' OK (or at least less annoying) because it was an open world).
I'm pressing through the racer career first (L13 now) so can't comment on the cops, maybe it's a lot worse as a cop than a racer, but up to now I certainly haven't come up against any gamebreakers, but then again I haven't tried to beat a friends time in earnest apart from the that 'first look' stage with the Zonda, where the random traffic problem became very apparent, and it took me 23 attempts to beat loopdreams
(I may well have been beaten again on that one since.)
Racing games always have a tough balancing act, especially the arcadey ones, we all know what Forza was like when you got off into the front before the first corner and just stayed there for the entire race without ever seeing another car - arcade racers just can't let that happen, so you basically have to accept that they'll cheat in one way or another.
Maybe I'm just a bit too forgiving, but then again I'm getting back into the 360 and more 'casual' PC games after 2 1/2 years immersed in WoW, whereby someone fucking
sneezing at the wrong time could wipe a 25-man raid and leave everyone with a 15 minute drag to get the party back to where they were - so a few unskippable cutscenes and some cheaty AI aren't really causing me too much offence
All in all I reckon Hot Pursuit is a lot of fun, and for every OH YOU CHEATING BASTARD moment it delivers, it delivers two or three sublime moments where you take down a couple of cops and the closest opponent racers, barge through a roadblock, and then do an insane perfect turbo to the finish line (and maybe EMP a helicopter in the process) - so for now at least, I'm giving it a pass