The world’s longest police chase lasted 620 miles — two straight days of tailgating that began in Germany and ended in the Ukraine. But it wouldn’t have dragged on for that long if European cops had access to the Bond-grade gadgetry that the fuzz do in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit — mechanical spike strips, helicopters that can swoop through tunnels, 10-car roadblocks, magical EMP, and more nitrous oxide than all the dentists in the world would ever need.

Hot Pursuit is a classic racing franchise in the hands of a new developer — Criterion Games, the British studio that brought us Burnout Paradise (and the entire Burnout series). Its career mode is two games in parallel, played on both sides of the law. The elegant god’s country of Seacrest County (a smorgasbord of California/Northwest–ish locales) is under siege by the most nefarious of all felons: speeders. The Seacrest police — seemingly funded by the personal fortune of Ryan Seacrest, or some very generous taxpayers — has dispatched millions of dollars’ worth of Lamborghinis, Aston Martins, Benzes, and BMWs to corral these crimedoers.

Being a cop is still one of the best things to happen to the racing genre. Fuming nitrous through your tailpipe to climb a hill, then T-boning an unsuspecting felon’s Nissan after he’s swerved to avoid the roadblock you called in a moment ago — it fulfills the dormant fantasy of anyone who’s ever done 13 miles over the speed limit on the way to the supermarket.

There’s an inherent drama to exchanging chassis-swipes with cars that are blaring red-blue, especially in multiplayer, where any eight-player combination of cops and crooks can be set against one another. In career mode, the A.I. is challenging and evasive — it’s a satisfying surprise the first time an A.I. racer reverses direction to avoid your patrol car mid-race, and then does it again a few minutes later.

And yet, Hot Pursuit is surprisingly elementary. Other than the novel thrill of police and weaponized cars, you won’t find any twists on race design: no knockout events, multiple-track tournaments, rivalries, or other unique formats to interrupt chase after chase. Much of the single-player career consists of filler missions — about a quarter of them are time-trial “previews” of cars you haven’t unlocked yet, where you’re driving from A to B while taking two-second penalties for any collisions. Carefully racing solo in this context feels like a time-out between Hot Pursuit missions.

More fundamentally, the game’s tracks are ordinary. They vary from two-lane canyon crawls to six-lane highways, all paved wide to grant enough room for dodging spike traps and executing nitrous-filled turns. But there are no surprising dips, handbrake-worthy curves, or breathtaking bridges worthy of all your RPMs. Even the shortcuts feel copied and pasted between circuits, appearing at steady two-mile intervals. Jumps are another baffling omission: not every driving game needs to be a pyrotechnic-laden stuntfest, but even simple elements — like the breakable wooden barriers that mark shortcuts — don’t snap and combust with the same razzle-dazzle satisfaction as they did in Burnout Paradise.

Elsewhere, Criterion has focused on extending the social aspects of the game. A Facebook-like system, called Autolog, threads itself through your character progression, automatically uploading lap times and photos to your in-game profile. Unfortunately, this information isn’t organized elegantly: it’s a jumble of shared photos and text about who’s unlocked what and the times they’ve registered.

As with Facebook, you’re given a stream of data to sift through to find info from your friends that’s interesting to you. A few aggregated graphs or overlaid route graphics would have visualized the data more usefully. Autolog does inject some competitive spirit into the single-player game — every event is bookended by comparing your friends’ best times against yours, and if you beat them, you can automatically post an update to their “wall.”

Regrettably, the audio — so important in racing games — doesn’t heighten the thrill of the chase beyond what you see onscreen. Criterion’s cars sport comfortable, arcadey handling, but the sound doesn’t do its job of conveying that you’re driving multi-faceted, high-dollar equipment instead of inhabiting a car as your “character.” Unlike Dirt or Grid, the sound effects aren’t nuanced to make you feel like a living, active gearbox is at work beneath your ride.

Criterion gave us grimace-inducing crash animations in Burnout Paradise’s automotive playground, and their expertise is on display here — but not all of it. Hot Pursuit feels a little too safe for its subject matter, limited by pedestrian road design that doesn’t express all the playfulness that we’d expect in car combat.

On Xbox 360

+ Tense multiplayer; seeing blue-red lights in your rear-view (or atop your own car).

+ High-detail, reverent car models; epic racing scenery.

- Indistinguishable track design; repetitive career missions; underwhelming audio.

? A racing game with cops but not a single jump? Wow.

7.0