Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

With each player having a markedly different goal, it's an interestingly asymmetrical setup for multiplayer racing. Escaping seems harder than pursuit - you need to spend a while outside the cop's large detection range to disappear off his map completely - although it will presumably get easier with knowledge of the map (Criterion points out that an interesting aspect of player pursuits is that you can just hide in the scenery, something that's not really possible with AI cops). The cop's "weapons" do modest damage but you'll achieve the fastest takedowns with direct contact, which is satisfying but not that easy in these incredibly fast, twitchy machines.

Criterion's not willing to divulge details of any other single- or multiplayer events at this point, although we see these titles options on the menu interfaces: Career, Patrol, Interceptor and Pursuit Race for cop; Rap Sheet, Cruise, Race, Pursuit Race and Interceptor for racer. Cruise and Patrol sound like free-roaming modes.

Multiplayer will support up to eight players online in any proportions; it could be seven cops and one racer, or vice versa. There'll be simple, unified progression across online and offline modes, with players racking up Bounty scores - which might as well be XP - in every event which go towards them ranking up. Ranks unlock new cars and content, but the advancement paths for cop and racer are completely separate.

It's all tied together by the Autolog, a sort of social networking interface layer for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit that's intended to tie friends together even when they're not offline. This screen presents several options: Photos, NFS Feed, NFS Friends, Career, Autolog Recommends, NFS News and NFS Store.

The Feed presents updates from friends' games and direct messages and photos (Criterion's encouraging players to use actual picture of themselves rather than avatars to make things "more real"). But the key feature here is Autolog Recommends, which will dynamically direct you to certain events based on what your friends are up to - noting that a friend has beaten your Bounty score on a particular event and linking you to the race to take it back, for example. This all happens automatically, without any need to publish a score or send a challenge.

Elsewhere in the interface, Friends List scoreboards are everywhere in the Geometry Wars style. Hot Pursuit has obvious potential as a multiplayer game, but Criterion's also showing a smart commitment to asynchronous multiplayer via this focus on score-attack rivalry. "We hope it will distract players in a good way," says Sullivan.

A Criterion-developed Need for Speed has been a no-brainer from the start, and although the E3 demo of the game is pretty limited in its scope, with much still left to learn, we've seen nothing to dissuade us of that opinion.