Almost done with the Racer career in NFS HP. Man, this game has the best weather/time of day in a racer. You can play the same area twice and it's like completely different tracks. I did this race in the middle of the night, wet track, rain and lightning, only 10-20 feet visibility. Was epic! Incredibly tense driving at 150mph looking out for traffic to pop out ahead of you any minute and give you only a moment to react. Then I did this track that was ALL FREEWAY. Just giant wide straights through colored lighting tunnels at 200mph. Felt nothing like any other race in the game, no hairpin turns or elevation or mountains/forests. Just gigantic roads.
The only way NFS HP could have been any better (and thus a perfect game) is if it had a better photo mode and this game SCREAMS for a race editor like PGR. I mean the entire game is Criterion taking this sandbox world and picking a start point, end point, type of event, time of day, type of track (slick, normal), and weather and hitting GO. There's no reason they couldn't let players do that as well and race home-made tracks with their friends. I'm guessing the only reason that's not in there is so they could sell you more "tracks" by DLC by doing it themselves. Still, despite those it's up there with Burnout Paradise and the PGRs as the best arcade racers this gen. Criterion & Bizarre are incredible racing developers. Too bad Bizarre is gone now and Criterion takes 3 years a game
Probably won't bother finishing the Cop career after I finish Racer. Cop is a fun gimmick of hitting people like Burnout-lite, but eh, wasn't huge on it and it seemed frustrating. Outside of the one Hot Pursuit race I was stuck on for weeks, Racer career has not been frustrating at all. Very doable, though the final races could change my opinion on it.
Some pics I took:
Pictures really do not do this game justice. It looks so nice in motion thanks to the post-processing effects.
