Well then. It was...
interesting.
The early reviews for this game weren't kidding when they said this was a spiritual successor to Burnout Paradise. Because it IS Burnout! The only NFS element that carried over are the cops, and by god they are hard to lose in a 'hunted' event.

The first cop event I ran into is with the Bentley and your goal is to escape the cops, starting from inside a warehouse. Expect the heavy SUVs from the original Most Wanted and Carbon, and heavy duty SWAT vehicles. One light smack against these and you're taken down.
I'm not sure if the damage system is like Burnout's, where after a certain amount of damage you must run through garages to fix your vehicle before the next smash puts your car out of commission. About the damage system - one hard smack is enough to knock out a vehicle. Including yours. Forget about the older Need for Speeds with their indestructible vehicles. Forget about even Hot Pursuit 2010. These vehicles are much more fragile.
Also I haven't figured out what the penalty is for being busted - I'm assuming they duck a few speed points?
I'd say the sense of speed isn't quite there compared to Hot Pursuit 2010, but it makes up for it with the amount of chaos that goes on. Also, hello chatty and cluttered UI. Autolog works though.
Actually the entire game itself is quite a step up in terms of difficulty, right off the bat. Very easy to screw up and when you screw up, it is epic.

Really liked the offroad races. But again, easy to screw up.
To address the PC gamers, it could use some tweaking. Ran alright on my computer, with everything on high except for two settings on medium - ambient oclusion and geometry detail. I could throw everything on high but I did notice increased stuttering. Still, even with the settings I had on it did stutter a bit at times, but nothing as disasterous as say Undercover when it first came out. Quick PC specs: Q6600, Geforce GTX 670, 6 GB of RAM, running at 1280x1024. (I know, crap res. I will get a larger monitor soon.)