A demo for Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit hit Xbox Live today so I took a little time away from Fallout New Vegas to check it out. I played a couple head to head races at E3 this past summer and enjoyed the game mode they had there.  In this demo there are a couple races available and it looks like more might unlock down the road.  All of the available races are in the career mode which is kind of lame because it is the multiplayer that I think will be fun.  But, I tried them out anyway.  The first race you start as a police officer and have to catch 4 racers before the end of the race and they escape.  You get 3 road blocks and 3 spike strips to use. I did pretty good at this race.  I got ahead of two of the racers right of the bat and used a spike strip on them.  It took a large chunk of their health so I was able to finish them off quickly.  For the other two racers I used the road blocks to slow them down and then rammed them repeatedly to finish them off. The second race was a 6 person one where you start in last have have to win. So, basically a normal career racing game mode.  I was able to get into 3rd pretty quick but it was not until the last corner of the race that I was able to make a lucky slide and pass into first.  Both races had a lot of side paths you can take to keep everyone off your tail.  However, they are narrow and I’m a bad driver so I stuck to the main course.  There are also challenges you can setup against your friends which seem similar to the ones in Blur.  Basically see if you can get a better score or time than your friends on the single player races. They are a fun add-on but not that big a deal to me.

I’m not that sold on NFS:HP.  I like the idea of the multiplayer head to head race mode but the cars feel really heavy and oversteering comes way to easily for me.  I’ll have to wait and see how many of my friends decide to get it.  Any maybe check back on the demo to see if there is a race that unlocks where I can be the one trying to get away from the cops.