Feeling the Hot Pursuit As I'm the Most Wanted

With the recent news that Criterion are back onto Need For Speed, I’m hyped. The team might have seen some change since Burnout Paradise, but they are a great studio. That concept they had for the extreme sports game never got off the ground, but there was promise within it.

And you’ll note that I said back to Need For Speed. Once finished with Burnout Paradise, the Criterion team were put onto EA’s other long-standing racing series to make Hot Pursuit. After the success of that game, they followed up with my personal favourite of the series in Most Wanted [2012].

While they did help with Rivals, their time on the series looked as though it was done, with Ghost Games [now EA Gothenburg] being the main developer of Rivals and taking on the series since that time.

With the news that Criterion are back, I’ve been revisiting those old games they have to their name to see what it is I liked about them. And though they differ greatly from the other, they both have something to enjoy.

Hot Pursuit took the cops and crooks concept and ran with it for the whole game, offering a mission structure that followed both sides. As the cops, you’d be hunting down racers, smashing into them and using the equipment on hand to arrest them. While the racers also had equipment, these were more defensive blocks to the police’s powerful force as you tried to complete the race.

The mission structure allowed both sides to be playable from one career, earning experience in the form of bounty to unlock new cars and equipment for that side. At first, you would start off with little in the way of power or speed, but through gaining experience would become a force to be reckoned with on whichever side you chose.

While there was also a freeroam mode, it felt a side feature to the missions. Despite not getting far with those missions, I could be found within the freeroam often, riding around in a police cruiser just taking in the scenery. The map might not be the most refined, but there’s still a decent amount of things to explore within it.

With Hot Pursuit’s map being more natural, the bustling city of Fairhaven is where Most Wanted takes us. And this time, the freeroam was the main attraction. Taking cues from Burnout Paradise, billboards and security gates are around to smash, with speed cameras also being placed around the streets.

The difference with Paradise are jackspots – the way to gain new vehicles. Scattered around the map are plenty of these spots that grant access to new vehicles, being in both easy to spot and hard to find locations. Once you’ve found a vehicle, it gets added to the list to warp to for future use, though you can swap at that location.

Each vehicle has six events tied to it to unlock performance upgrades for that car. The reason for doing so is to encourage swapping vehicles to build up your Most Wanted level, as there’s ten drivers who will only challenge you once you have enough Most Wanted reputation.

I love exploring this world more than the one in Hot Pursuit, with the cops always on the lookout for wrong-doing and some very great chases able to be had. This was one of my most played games on the PSV, such was the fact I had double the Most Wanted level of the highest on the list when returning to it on PC.

Neither game has the size or variety in their maps as latest games, but those latest games lack something in terms of mechanics when driving. I’ve still yet to play Heat, but it is one I’m wanting to get to. As Ghost Games’ last, it will be interesting to compare their first solo effort to their last.

As for Criterion and the newest game they are working on ready for the next generation (for a release in 2021, I expect), I hope it can be as great as these two games rolled into one. Featuring the exploration of Most Wanted with the tightness in mission structure (and the cops and crooks concept) of Hot Pursuit, and a map that I’ll want to be exploring featuring plenty of variety.

Jumping Early to Access Some Greats

In the last few years I’ve started to branch out some more with games, rather than sticking with the few series that I know. Most of that has been with the Switch, but I have been hunting for things in other places, too.

Steam would be a good place to go, with sales and cheaper prices overall than what you’d find on a console store, and it was something of a surprise when I pretty much stumbled upon one of the two I’ll be talking about here. The other one I had seen before and had got interest in, but had fallen off my radar pretty quickly. The day after buying that first game, however, I found it again.

That first game would be Littlewood, the RPG game where there’s no battles to be had, with the world already having been saved. By you. The hero. Who has lost their memory. The task of this RPG is to gain back the memories you lost by building up the town and attracting more people to it.

You’ll build relationships with those people, which levels up your relationship meter with each one, and only through hitting those levels will you unlock small cutscenes of townsfolk talking to each other and learning of events of the past. The dialogue is a big part of this, then, and the writing is on point. There’s charm to it, with some fun interaction to be had with all.

You’ll be working to build the town, gathering materials to use and money to spend, and the game teaches the basics of everything it throws at you, with new things always being introduced to add to the town. It feels pretty similar to Harvest Moon and Rune Factory in that it’s an open-ended game about exploring new places to build relationships and increase the things available for you to build within the town.

The game is a bit restrictive in that area, as while you can place anything wherever you want, everything has to be south facing. Even ramps up to higher ground. As such, to get the most out of the area, it feels as though any high areas you want to place should be put to the north. Other than that, designing the town is a delightful thing to be doing, with changes easy to make with the always accessible build mode.

Onto the second game, which you’ll know about if you’re following me on Twitter, as I had given a small review of it on there. That game is Temtem, the monster catching RPG MMO. With a story that can be tackled solo or with a friend, a complete roster of varying creatures, and battle mechanics that offer up a bit more strategy than a certain other monster catching RPG.

I started out with the character creator trying to get as close to my style as possible, which I managed to do just fine. There were no glasses to choose from the off, but I soon found a pair in one of the stores later into the game. After a bit of cutscene dialogue and a bit of an explore, it was time to get my first Temtem. I went with the monkey-like ‘tem – Smazee – but he quickly would become a secondary team member once I started collecting more.

It has the feel of an RPG down right, with the option of multiple dialogue strands with a large chunk of the NPCs I encountered. Even with those who wanted nothing but a battle, the option of choosing how I reacted to certain comments made it feel like I was more involved with my adventure. Some of the options were also the information gathering type, so you could ask someone what they’re doing or just leave them be with a cheery goodbye.

Within battles, you’ll need to be aware of the stamina of each ‘tem, as all moves require the use of some of it – with more powerful moves taking a large chunk from it. Some of those powerful moves won’t be available for use until a turn or two passes. There’s still type advantages to be found here, as well, so it’s not just a case of waiting it out them unleashing a powerful move after a few turns.

I was impressed with what I’ve played of it, and while comparisons to Pokémon can’t be escaped, I’m not looking at the main series here with this comparison. Instead, it feels like how a current-gen follow-up to Gale of Darkness would be if it moved away from the Orre region and linked the towns together. There was something to the design of the Gamecube games that I feel was never replicated in any of the main series games, but that Temtem does.

Part of that comes from a feeling of connectivity with the world, where everything looks as though it would really be there – even if certain creative licence is taken in the positioning of small parts of locations. Another part is – feeding into the connectivity again – that despite offering a maze-like structure to locations, they still feel natural parts of the world. The third part relates to NPCs and their fitting into the world as natural objects within it, offering a greater sense of them being a part of the world through dialogue.

Both games are RPGs, and both are on Early Access. But despite that, both feel pretty much complete already, but the fine-tuning of certain things from feedback of those who play them will help in bringing out the best of them. Both offer great dialogue and a great world to explore, in an art style that fits for what they are. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played of both, and will be sure to continue exploring what each has to offer.

Rallying the Last Piece of the Racing Puzzle

I’ve played plenty of racing games in varying different styles across the numerous years. There’s a certain type I had not really played all that often, however. Aside when being at an arcade and able to access the Sega Rally machines, I hadn’t really played any sort of a rally game. I felt that I’d not be much good at them, with the thin tracks and my varied skill in racing, so I was content to just let rally experiences be something contained to those arcade machines.

I usually read reviews from Nintendo Life even if I’m not much interested in checking a game out, just to see if there’s anything that I’d like in it. Every possibility I can be convinced to try something new, after all. On New Year’s Eve, I read a review from the site for a racing game. A rally game. Sure, it was a mobile port, but it looked as packed of content as plenty of other racing games, with the review and comments saying how the gameplay was excellent, rivalling plenty of other racing games on the Switch. Did I want to go for it, though?

As soon as New Year’s Day hit, I was on the eShop to get it. The more realistic racers I would usually keep contained to the Xbox, but this one I wanted portable so I could jump straight into it. So, half an hour after the new year had started, I was to be found playing Rush Rally 3. I’d started with the career, buying my first car and giving it a bit of an upgrade, then getting into that first championship. I managed to drive the stages well, though did mess up at times. I did good enough to secure a third, and after that went straight back into it after a sleep to secure a better position.

The mechanics of racing just felt right, with no errors being down to those mechanics. Every mistake was down to me, and how I mishandled the vehicle overcorrecting a turn or forceful use of the handbrake. Opponents are skilled enough so a few small mistakes didn’t matter, with me barely scraping victory in a few of the stages and others just falling short of the top spot. Overall, I managed a second in the championship, which I was happy enough with at that point to want to explore the other options within the game.

Rally Cross was more like the usual racing experiences I would play, with other competitors on the track and three laps to take the top spot. The handling worked here as well as in the rally stages, with me managing the same results in this mode as in the career. Skill Games test the ability of a driver to keep a high speed while avoiding obstacles. It’s difficult to remain on a driving line with traffic on the road or missiles being fired at you, but the best drivers are able to claim the gold on the mode. I… can’t be counted among that number yet.

There’s also the Single Rally which I had a go at, where drivers have to tackle the six stages of a country while managing not to damage their car too much otherwise they’d end up at a disadvantage when it came to repairs at the end of each even numbered stage. Much the same as ever, I was close to the top spot but failed to get it owing to one rather large mistake undoing the great work I’d put in to get a great advantage over the other drivers.

There’s still a lot to be doing with the game, as I’ve only started out with most of what the game offers. I’ve still yet to touch the time trial modes of Single Stage and Hot Laps, and I haven’t been able to get a Live Event done yet owing to not having a car at the right ranking. Much like other games, the upgrades on a car determine its rank, and I really wanted that Mini-like car that I spent the winnings from all the racing I’d done on it along with a few upgrades.

The experience I’ve had with Rush Rally 3 has been great. It really is right at home on Switch. And now that I know I’ll enjoy getting stuck into some other rally type games, I’ve already got my eye on one from Game Pass. Rush Rally 3 has also encouraged me to branch out again with racing games, having for the most year mostly stuck with Forza Horizon 4. I’ll be enjoying this one for a good while, with it comfortably sitting at the primary game spot for Switch.