Players can unlock a new playable character in Deathstroke, a medieval-themed Elseworld, and new gear and weapons. Episode 8 features the final conflict with Brainiac, bringing the story to a close. Servers will remain available, and players can experience previous seasonal content while acquiring LutherCoins and spending them in the store. An offline mode is also currently available.

Other notable titles include Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered for PS4, which includes cross-play and visual improvements, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe for PS4 and PS5. The latter is an enhanced version of the 2013 narrative adventure with tons of new content and secrets to enhance the experience.

But it’s not all bad news. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered will be coming to Xbox Game Pass and EA Play on June 24th. The title, a remaster of Criterion’s 2010 Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, features cross-platform multiplayer on all platforms. It released in December of last year.

The game was remastered by Stellar Entertainment, who also did the remaster for Criterion’s excellent Burnout Paradise. The remaster includes all of the game’s DLC and added new car colors, quality of life improvements, an updated photo mode, and more. We thought it was pretty good, so it’s worth checking out if you have a racing itch.

With Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, EA has seemingly flicked a thumb at the nose of ninth-gen console fans by releasing this eighth-gen only title on November 6th, less than a week before the PlayStation 5 comes out. We have no news yet about enhanced versions for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, though some kind of update is more than likely.

But what exactly are gamers getting on November 6th? Let’s take a look.

A look at 2010’s Hot Pursuit

Considering that the 2020 remaster is based on one of the seventh-generation’s seminal racing titles, it makes sense to go back and take a look at the technology underpinning the original 2010 Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Hot Pursuit was, itself, a reimagining of 2002’s Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. After the Need for Speed franchise dove deep into story and open world complexity with the likes of Need for Speed Underground, Hot Pursuit was something of a return to roots. The features an open world environment, four times larger than the one in Criterion’s previous outing Burnout Paradise. However, gameplay placed a much stronger emphasis on the interplay between police interceptors and racers, with two separate career modes for each.

Hot Pursuit is built on a heavily enhanced version of Criterion’s Burnout Paradise engine, designed around a more expansive, wide open environments, a refined physics model, with deferred lighting for the environment and image-based rendering for cars. By targeting a 30 FPS update, unlike the 60 FPS experience in Burnout Paradise, Criterion was able to push the visuals out there, one of the reasons why Hot Pursuit holds up so well, even today.

The image-based rendering for vehicles, in particular, is a standout feature. In Hot Pursuit, the environment around the cars is rendered first. The cars themselves are introduced in a separate rendering pass. This allows for lighting, shading, and reflections on cars to be based on the surrounding environment, significantly enhancing realism.

In terms of image quality, the game delivered this high level of visual fidelity at a locked 720p, with 2x MSAA, no less, on seventh gen consoles. This is a remarkable state of affairs, considering how low resolutions dropped towards the latter end of the seventh generation. If we had to pick a single multi-platform seventh-gen title that’d hold up in a 2020 remaster without too much of an asset rework, it’d probably be Hot Pursuit. But what does that mean today, in terms of the 2020 remaster? How much work has Stellar Entertainment put into it? And how does it hold up relative to contemporary titles? This is where things get a bit disappointing.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2020 – a performance-oriented retouch

We’ve seen some phenomenal remaster work this console generation, starting with Rockstar giving Grand Theft Auto 5 the next-gen treatment. Saint’s Row 3 Remastered was another example, with physically-based rendering and a new lighting model completely transforming the game’s aesthetic.

Unfortunately, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit doesn’t appear to do any of those things. There’s a reason the game has been able to target 4K/60 FPS on the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4. That’s because this is, at heart, a seventh-gen title with a light coat of paint on top.

Model quality: the biggest improvement

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit always made great looking cars a priority, with the separate image-based rendering system for car lighting built to ensure that cars are in top form. If there’s one positive about the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remaster, it’s that the cars receive an extra lick of paint: model quality and polygon counts are up, even compared to the maxed out PC original. It’s not a radical improvement. Model quality is still very much in line with seventh gen titles, with the cars themselves not that far off from what we see in late gen titles like Forza Horizon 2. PC gamers looking for any kind of measurable improvement over the original, will likely see it here.

Draw distances: pushing things out further

Unlike Burnout Paradise, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit takes place in a more expansive, rural environment. This means that draw distances can have a measurable impact on overall quality. While the original was praised for its environmental rendering, remaster dev Stellar Entertainment has dialled things up a notch or two here. Grass, buildings, electricity posts, and Hot Pursuit’s many, many trees render much further out into the distance. This complements the higher resolution output on the mid-gen refresh consoles. At the original game’s 720p output on seventh gen consoles, there weren’t quite enough pixels onscreen to make extreme distant detail properly visible. This is, of course, a moot point at 4K.

Enhanced Transparencies and reflections

High quality alpha effects for smoke and fog render at a higher resolution than in the original game, scaling nicely with the higher resolution output on consoles. Enhanced reflections do justice to the image-based lighting system used for the cars, bringing environmental reflections into much sharper focus. Again, these are minor touches, but they contribute to a more refined experience overall.

Resolution and framerate

Although the consoles versions aren’t the focus and we are not showing any console footage in this video, we just wanted quick give away some information about them.

The biggest improvements console gamers will see with the 2020 Hot Pursuit remaster are in terms of resolution and framerate. Arguably, the PC version of the game has always supported higher resolutions and framerates, so this is nothing new for the Remaster’s PC outing. However, gamers on the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro are in for a 9x improvement to render resolution which is 4K and 30fps, or a 2x boost to resolution coupled with a doubled framerate which is 1080p and 60fps. Apparently, only  the PC version supports 4K/60 FPS output. This is somewhat puzzling considering how well a number of last-gen remasters have run on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. Regardless, console gamers who want a performance option will have access to a 1080p/60 FPS mode on the enhanced consoles.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered only runs at 1080p/30 FPS on the base PS4 and Xbox One. It’s hard to see a reason, apart from a lack of optimisation efforts, as to why this last-gen title runs at such a poor target on the base consoles. A 1080p/60 mode, even one using dynamic resolution scaling would have been far more preferable. As it stands, base Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners are getting a bump to resolution from 720p to 1080p, the other added enhancements and… well, that’s about it.

Conclusion

This late into the console generation, we expected a bit more, even if Hot Pursuit Remastered isn’t a new game entirely. The overall experience holds up well, but that’s mostly down to the fact that Criterion’s original 2010 game was far ahead of the curve in terms of visuals and the gameplay experience. 10 years later, slightly enhanced LODs and model quality don’t seem like this is a compelling remaster from a technical perspective.

"The ability to choose between favoring the frame rate and a 4K resolution is a welcomed gift for PS4 Pro and Xbox One X players as well."

That isolation gave it a powerful spotlight and earned its reputation as one of Criterion’s finest non-Burnout games. Since then, even more emphasis has been put on realistic physics and ultra-high-fidelity graphics and sound, while giving a backseat to the crashing and bashing of the early 2000’s. But with games like Trackmania and Horizon Chase Turbo raking in the dough lately, the market for more pick-up-and-play racing games that focus more on style than realism is clearly still alive and well. EA, not being blind to this, has certainly taken notice by releasing a remaster of Burnout Paradise in 2018 and now Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. So it’s come full circle. One of the Need for Speed franchise’s best games is now available in a slick remaster on modern consoles and PC, and just in time for its tenth anniversary, no less.

This new version of the game is not simply a better running version of the original. A remaster could certainly have gotten away with that, but Hot Pursuit Remastered does a few smart things, like including all of the original DLC, which adds at least six more hours of gameplay with 30 additional challenges, as well as trophies and achievements for those. On top of that, a whole host of visual upgrades including better textures, improved reflections and shadows, and better draw distances.

These upgrades are definitely striking on the cars themselves, but some of the lighting effects and environmental assets are, just as noticeably still, from ten years ago. Lens flares look flat, and background objects like trees and buildings don’t seem to have gotten nearly as much attention as the cars and roads. You’ll rarely notice this though, as you’ll be whizzing by them most of the time, but it is a rather obvious inconsistency when you do.

"The steady upgrade paths for both racers and cops holds up nicely here with a persistent stream of cars to unlock in each class and new events opening up all over the map. "

The ability to choose between favoring the frame rate and a 4K resolution is a welcomed gift for PS4 Pro and Xbox One X players as well. Perhaps the best thing that’s been added though is the ability to turn on cross play functionality in Hot Pursuit’s multiplayer modes. This will allow PlayStation, Xbox and PC players to all compete and compare times together, and gives players of the original game the ability to meet back up like old friends regardless of what systems they own today. If we combine that with -hopefully- some new players coming in who might have missed the original release, we could be in for a fairly robust community going forward.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit stood out back in 2010 for its emphasis on cop chases and stylish Burnout-esque takedowns, as well as its control style of being slightly more realistic than Burnout but still far more arcadey than the likes of Gran Turismo. This remastered version does just as much today as it’s not nearly as sensitive as the current simulation games out there, but does require significantly more skill than, say, Mario Kart 8 to get anywhere. It’s just as good a mix now as it ever was as almost anybody can be decent at it, but there’s also plenty of room for hardcore fans to be rewarded for further improvement.

The steady upgrade paths for both racers and cops holds up nicely here with a persistent stream of cars to unlock in each class and new events opening up all over the map. The variety of events is also still good enough to keep your attention, with the 1-on-1 duels and the hot pursuits being the clear stand outs. You’ll be going up against cops, other racers, and the clock in just enough ways to keep things interesting throughout, especially once you get good at using spike strips and road blocks and other items.

"The variety of events is also still good enough to keep your attention, with the 1-on-1 duels and the hot pursuits being the clear stand outs."

Weather and the time of day do play a role here with how tracks feel to race on, but it’s generally pretty subtle by today’s standards. While the class types and customization options for your cars feels downright shallow if you directly compare them to modern offerings in the genre, it also feels like a breath of fresh air to just play for a few hours, unlock a bunch of cars, pick one, make it a different color and get back on the road. There is a certain type of beauty in that simplicity that shouldn’t only belong to all the retro-style indie racing games of today. Even though Hot Pursuit is a 10-year-old game, it also fills the void of a modern-style racer with a more streamlined experience that doesn’t keep you bogged down in menus for any longer than it has to. The real focus of this game is always on the actual racing, and that’s one of its greatest strengths.

Aside from the general structure of the game holding up well, the moment-to-moment racing also still feels fantastic in 2020. Shunting a suspect from behind or slamming into the side of their tail for a devastating maneuver is just as satisfying as it ever was. While narrowly avoiding the cops as a racer, and maybe taking a couple of them out with spike strips or EMPs on your way to that precious finish line has also retained virtually all of its gratifying charm.

"Even though Hot Pursuit is a 10-year-old game, it also fills the void of a modern-style racer with a more streamlined experience that doesn’t keep you bogged down in menus for any longer than it has to."

With that, the game also unfortunately hangs on to its few-but-still-noticeable annoyances. The cop checkpoints are still threading a ridiculously thin needle than the need to be and the developer evidently couldn’t have been bothered to add in the inability to tilt the camera up or down to see over hills, which will absolutely result in the occasional, totally unnecessary crash, just like it did ten years ago. However, outside of things like that, Hot Pursuit Remastered largely does manage to get away with coasting on what a great game it was ten years ago with its gameplay.

Despite the few nitpicks I’ve mentioned, there’s no getting around the fact that Hot Pursuit is still a wonderfully snappy and nimble racer that, in this form, can easily steal your attention away from modern AAA racing titles. It’s a good remaster, but an even better racing game that mostly stands the test of time while still getting the heart pumping in all the right ways.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

We’ve been hearing about Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered for a while. It was first leaked back in June, which has been followed in subsequent months by several retailer listings and the game being age rated in South Korea. Now, it seems like the official reveal is around the corner as well.

EA are counting down to a Need for Speed-related reveal, with the countdown ending tomorrow, October 5, at 8 AM PT. with the words “Reignite the Pursuit” written beneath the countdown.

Additionally, Twitter user @Renka_schedule has also leaked the box arts for the game’s PS4 and Nintendo Switch version, details on the remaster, and new screenshots, all of which you can view below.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered will apparently have over 6 hours of completely new content, including over 30 challenges. Meanwhile, there will supposedly also be new customization options and new Trophies and Achievements. All the DLC originally released for the base game will also be included. The leak also mentions that the remaster is being developed by Stellar Entertainment, who previously worked on Burnout Paradise Remastered.

We will probably know more tomorrow, once the game has officially been unveiled. Stay tuned for all the details.

PS4/Switch
「Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered」

11月6日発売、税込4299円

・全DLC収録済

・約6時間の追加ゲームプレイ（30を超えるチャレンジ含む）、新たなアチーブメント＆車の色など、追加DLCを発売時に全て配信予定

・クロスプラットフォーム マルチプレイ対応#NeedforSpeed　#NFS pic.twitter.com/VGAzreyndu

— れんか (@Renka_schedule) October 4, 2020

Burnout was, at one point, one of the purest fun experiences on the planet. Part racing game, part pure destruction, for a long time it was something to get out all your aggression out in the form of crushed metal and carnage. Now, though, it’s one of many IPs rotting in the EA graveyard, but at the very least you will be able to take the last entry, Burnout Paradise Remastered, on the go with a Switch version, and we might have an idea of when it’s releasing.

While nothing official has been announced, on the US eShop, a release date of June is shown. While on the online page it simply says 2020, as you can see via Twitter user Wario64 below, when you go in manually through the system the date is shown there (it still is as of writing this). Can’t help but note that price, too, at a whopping $49.99. For reference, the original version that released on PS4 and Xbox One launched at $39.99 in 2018. It is the first time Paradise has been on a Nintendo system, in fact it’ll be the first Burnout game to do so since Burnout Legends on Nintendo DS in 2005. I guess they expect you to pay.

Burnout Paradise Remastered is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. The Switch will possibly be release on June 19th.

Burnout Paradise Remastered is releasing on Switch on June 19th according to the eShop pic.twitter.com/O2RnP3IRVd

— Wario64 (@Wario64) April 17, 2020

Nintendo revealed during their shadow-dropped Nintendo Direct Mini presentation yesterday that Burnout Paradise Remastered is coming to the Switch. EA’s support for the hybrid platform has been severely lacking and best and has been the recipient of much criticism, though the publisher has expressed interest in rectifying that- surely, this is a good first step down that road (one would hope).

EA have also released a trailer for the Switch release of the open world trailer, which you can view below. The game will run at 60 FPS, feature touch screen controls for its map, include all post-launch DLC, and, of course, the base game itself. Stellar Entertainment are once again handling the game’s port. No release date – another than a 2020 window – has been announced yet.

Burnout Paradise Remastered launched for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC in March 2018. In our review, we praised the remaster efforts for one of the all-time racing greats. You can read our full review through here.