YMMV / Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Seacrest County Police Department has impossibly large fleets of interceptor vehicles made up almost entirely of high-end exotic sports cars and supercars, including Bugatti Veyrons, rare Aston Martin One-77s, and even one-off concept cars. In fact, the real-life Dubai Police Force boasts a similarly lavish police fleet that, yes, really does field Veyrons and One-77s. Of course, because of the high value of these "super patrol cars", they are mostly for show and only used for patrolling rich, low-risk tourist areas, and even Dubai's motor pool is still rather tame compared to the SCPD and RCPD's. Similarly, the Italian police have used a Gallardo 560-4 as an actual interceptor unit (which has since been retired and replaced with the Lamborghini Huracan). Unlike the Dubai exotic police fleet, however, the Italian Lamborghini interceptors do serve a practical use in the form of emergency organ transport given how crucial it is for vital organs to be delivered to patients in dire need.
• Catharsis Factor: If the cops annoyed the hell out of you in both Need for Speed: Most Wanted games and Need for Speed Heat, then this game has it by the crapload in the Cop campaign for the 2010 version. While you can't quite drive Rhino SUVs, you do have access to some equally impressive Cool Cars like the Koenigsegg CCX or the Lamborghini Murcielago LP-640. That, and most of the other equipment the cops throw at you in those games (e.g., roadblocks, helicopters, and spike strips) you can use against the Racers, too.
• Contested Sequel: Hot Pursuit 2010. Older fans love it for basically being a throwback, gameplay-wise, to the first four Need for Speed games with a little bit of Burnout formula such as boosts and takedowns. The reception from sixth-and-early-seventh-gen-era fans ranges from indifference to dislike due to the lack of vehicle customization besides colors (though that was rectified in Remastered with the addition of a vinyl editor, except that like in some older games, you cannot share your designs online). Even within the fans of the Hot Pursuit sub-series, a vocal minority weren't fond of the weapon mechanics and the single-player gameplay being restricted only to the campaign mode, unlike previous Hot Pursuit games, and when the 2010 game got a remaster in 2020, some of these fans even claimed that the game that should've been remastered was Hot Pursuit 2.
• Critical Dissonance: While Hot Pursuit Remastered received weaker critical reception than the original release of Hot Pursuit (2010) for being a rather bare-bones remaster, especially compared to other video games remasters released by then, it was still mostly positive. User reviews on Metacritic, however, have been much harsher on the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One versions' Metacritic entries, with harsher criticism towards the bare bones remastering to the point of calling it yet another EA cash grab, as well as some players shouting their desires for a remaster of a "superior" earlier installment. On the other hand, the Switch version has been more positively received by that platform's players, since this is the first Need for Speed game on a Nintendo console since 2013's Most Wanted U (and a more complete version than that game at that, since Most Wanted U only got one of its four DLC packs as standard and never received the rest), and it's a version of the original Criterion version of Hot Pursuit instead of some bland version of Nitro like what the Wii version got.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Racer takedowns as the Cops in general (2010 game). Some takedown lines can range from amusing to hilariously sadistic, especially if those accompany takedowns that see the car fly out of the road and, in some cases, into the sea (since many of Seacrest's routes are along a coastal line).
  Police Officer: That'll teach them to mess with the SCPD.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: Hot Pursuit 2 rotates the camera around the car when doing a major jump, making it impossible to see what's ahead until you land.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Two specific aliases that can be found in the track records menu of the PlayStation release of III: Hot Pursuit are Razor and Angie.
• Narm Charm: The cop dialogue of Hot Pursuit 2 found on the PlayStation 2 release has several cheesy lines, but they're also guaranteed to be quite amusing and charming at the same time, such as these:
  "Slam dunk him!"
  "Let's force him off the road, yeehaw!"
  "If we can arrest this suspect, donuts for everybody!"
• Older Than They Think: In Hot Pursuit (2010), spike strips that are dropped from the rear of a car had been previously used by Assassins in Need for Speed: Carbon - Own The City.
• Retroactive Recognition: The female County Dispatch officer in Hot Pursuit 2 is voiced by Sharon Alexander, who would go on to become better known among Need for Speed fans for voicing Samantha in Need for Speed: Underground.
• Sacred Cow: Many fans consider Hot Pursuit 2 to be their favorite entry to the sub-series, as they say it's the very best with hardly any flaws to talk about. But to make it clear, it will usually be the PlayStation 2 version (developed by Black Box) they're talking about.
• Sequel Displacement: Hot Pursuit 2 to the original: it's much faster than its predecessor, and features more tracks and cars, plus a new soundtrack to bring the sub-series to the 2000s. It even sold more than the original and was more popular. Chances are that, if you see some "classic era" fan claiming that said era was the golden era of Need for Speed and points to Hot Pursuit as an example, more often than not they'll be making reference to Hot Pursuit 2 rather than III: Hot Pursuit.