As the title suggests, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, is all about racing your favorite sports cars with the added challenge of having to avoid the cops. The cars are all licensed and even come with the factory paint selection. There are also more expensive NFS versions of every car, but they seem to lack any significant difference except for having custom paint jobs and perhaps handling a little better. The selection is large and varied (32, including the nine “Cop” variants), but in tournament races there are only a handful to choose from at a time.

Unfortunately, the track selection isn’t quite as robust. Although you could claim that there are about 48 total courses, this is mostly due to the fact that every track has mirrored, backwards, and backwards-mirrored variations. That drops the number down to twelve. However, even those twelve are really just different parts of four main areas: Mediterranean, Island, Autumn, and Forest. There are just different roads open or closed on different courses. It also would have been nice to have a few night variations or weather effects. On the up-side, all of the races are very long, averaging about five minutes or so, and have multiple side roads. There’s a lot of room for exploration, and it takes several runs through a course to determine which side roads are shortcuts and which are detours.

Hot Pursuit mode is the meat of the game and places you in a series of races where you not only have other racers to contend with, but cops and traffic as well. There are several different kinds of races within Hot Pursuit. Deliveries place you in a particular type of vehicle and require you to take it to a drop off point within a set time frame. In tournaments you race through three or four tracks, earning points for your position in each race and going for the best overall score. Knockouts take a last-man-standing approach. Every lap, the last car to make it over the finish line will be eliminated until only one remains. A few specific races are even set up between rival car manufacturers such as Dodge and Chevy. You’ll get to choose your favorite and determine who really makes the better cars. Aside from those races, though you’ll work your way up to faster and faster vehicles as you progress through the series.

In Hot Pursuit, the police are your biggest obstacle. They will ram you off the road, set up spike strips, or even call a helicopter to drop bombs on you. If you happen to get stopped for any length of time, they’ll bust you, and the race will be over. Aside, from busts though, cops can easily cost you the race by forcing you into the rails or off the road while other racers go by. Fortunately, you can lose the cops if you knock them off the road or get far enough out of their sight that they give up the chase.

The Championship mode is a similar series of races, but without having to fight the cops all the time. In all honesty, this mode really comes across as a warm-up to Hot Pursuit. If you’ve already gotten used to dealing with the cops, racing the same tracks without them feels like a breeze. The difficulty also seems somewhat unbalanced in Championship. You’ll rip through a few races without even seeing any cars in your rear-view mirror, and then suddenly find yourself in a race where you’re constantly left in the dust. After spending an hour or two on that race, you’ll move on to another race just as easy as the ones before.

Single Race allows you to do whatever you want, with all of the vehicles and tracks available to unlock. You can customize a number of options and do two-player races, but it also has another mode of play: Be the Cop. Now the roles are reversed. You’re the one driving the cop car, and you only have a limited amount of time to bust as many racers as possible. When you spot a racer and turn on the siren, a power bar will appear, and you’ll need to ram the car until it’s gone. If you want, you can also call on backup at any time with the cross pad. Other cops will come to your assistance. You can call on the chopper, or if you want to take out those pesky lawbreakers really fast, you can have your department set up a spike strip to wreck their tires. It’s obviously a quick diversion from the rest of the game, but it’s still fun to turn the tables once in a while.

For nearly everything you do — leading laps, earning medals, losing the cops, busting racers — you get points that are used to shop in Single Race mode. You can unlock cars and tracks freely as long as you have enough points. Plus, you can even see everything available from the beginning so you can save your points for super-expensive cars like the NFS McLaren F1 LM. It’s a great way of handling unlockables since you can skip all the stuff you don’t want and go straight for the fastest cars.

Graphically, the game does suffer from some pretty serious framerate problems. You may not notice it while you’re focused on the race, but it can get pretty ugly at times. There is one distracting feature in NFS: HP2 called the jump cam. Whenever you catch a significant amount of air, the camera will switch to a third-person shot from the front of the vehicle and the sound will be muted until you hit the ground. It really doesn’t seem to flow with the race, and luckily you can turn it off in the options menu. The cars are detailed though, and the courses are large and full with lots of trees, rocks, shrubbery, café tables, etc. Damage models are present, but are extremely limited. Basically, you have to almost intentionally trash a car before it looks like it’s taken any damage, and even then it only features open and slightly crunched hoods or trunks with a bit of smoke trailing out.

The sound effects aren’t all that notable, but each engine has its own distinct sound. Some of the background effects seem out of place though. It really doesn’t make sense that someone in a car roaring by at speeds over 100 miles per hour could hear a bird chirping in the woods. Radio chatter from the police officers is somewhat repetitive and the same cop voices are used in every area. Cops in the Mediterranean shouldn’t sound like they’re from Alabama, but they do. The music is licensed from several artists, and although the selection seems to be catered for several different tastes, it fails to distinguish itself and gets old pretty fast.

One thing that multiplatform owners should be aware of is that the GameCube version isn’t quite up to par with the one on PS2. Apparently, there were some things added in the PS2 version after the transition process began for GameCube. The courses aren’t quite the same, and the replay mode found in the GC version is completely bare-bones compared to the one on PS2. If all you have is a GameCube, it isn’t enough to worry about, but if you have a PS2, by all means, test-drive both versions before deciding which one to buy.