Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Gauntlet and Rapid Response are time trial variants; in the first, a Racer has to beat a time while under attack from cops, while Rapid Response asks a cop to reach an incident before time runs out, with the twist of time penalties for all damage taken.

Hot Pursuit involves a fleet of cops trying to break up a race by taking down racers using brute force or the weapons and items at their disposal (spike strips, EMPs and so on; racers have a balancing set). Interceptor is a one-on-one, open-world, cat-and-mouse chase in which a racer tries to evade a cop by staying out of his range (it was our first taste of the game at E3). These two modes, along with straight Races, are available in multiplayer.

With the exception of the free-roaming Interceptor, most events are point-to-point races taking in long (sometimes really quite long) swathes of Seacrest County's scenery. Circuit layouts are eschewed, so watching your mini-map and learning the many off-road short-cuts are essential. There are some mild weather effects - damp roads, mostly - but it's the game's day-night cycle that has the biggest impact, with night-time races ramping up the difficulty considerably. On these country roads, street lamps are few and you'll be relying on your headlamps and the tail lights of traffic and rivals to guide you.

Although you're often competing for race position and always earning Bounty - which is awarded according to your performance and serves a triple purpose as score, XP and car-unlocking currency - the game's design and presentation put a firm focus on time in almost every event type. "It's the simplest, most well-understood unit of measurement for a racing game," explains Webster. "Everything else, you have to try and explain. Everyone knows that a low time is good."

Times also work perfectly as the focus for Autolog, the game's social network-style system of event recommendations and "offline" competition between friends, detailed extensively in Rich's preview last month. If you want to try to beat a friend's time or score - after spotting it on their "wall", say, or in the game's news feed - you're only a single button-press away from that event. The efficient UI has friend-focused leaderboards everywhere (also mentioning the car used to set that particular time) and Hot Pursuit uses Facebook accounts and friend-of-friend comparisons to help extend your friends network.

"Road Rules was an asynchronous game mode that we did a pretty good job of hiding in Burnout Paradise, but when people discovered it, they used it a lot," says Webster. "We realised that it's really tough to get people online together at the same time. With things like Facebook, people are hardly ever online at the same time... but the system still facilitates that social interaction. So that's what we've concentrated on.

"Also, the truth is that we think seasoned gamers have eight to 10, maybe more friends on a platform. Most people don't have nearly that many. We think it's really important to encourage. No-one's really pushed it as far as we think it could go."

It's clever thinking, inspired by score-attack successes like Geometry Wars 2 and Trials HD, but it's going to be hard to tell how well it will work before the game's out in the wild; arcade racers don't usually develop the thriving communities of multiplayer shooters. That's something Criterion would like to fix, without necessarily demanding the same intense devotion of its players.

Setting Autolog aside, Hot Pursuit is an evocative and thrilling racer built on Burnout's most solid foundations. It's gorgeous, too, looking far smoother than its 30 frames a second and showcasing its flamboyant four-wheeled stars with a flawless third-person camera that has bespoke settings for every vehicle in the game. Criterion worked on the camera "like you wouldn't believe," says Webster. "I think the single most important factor when it comes to how a driving game feels is the camera. And most games' are s**t. They are."

If there's a worry, it's that multiplayer races and Hot Pursuits can get a little strung out along the immense courses. But in all honesty, it hardly matters. Like the very best racing games, be they hardcore sims or flights of arcade fancy, Hot Pursuit boils down to you, your vehicle, a ticking clock and the next beautiful bend in the road. That's all speed really needs.