Need for Speed: The Run

In the time it's taken Black Box to make Need for Speed: The Run, we've had three other awesome NFS titles from other developers. While that's great for fans, it kind of spoiled Black Box's return to form. Need for Speed: The Run feels like a traditional NFS game, released after the franchise had already redefined itself.

What Need for Speed: The Run has going for it is that it feels more like an old-school NFS game than the last few "spinoff" titles have. Developer Black Box has been making NFS games for over a decade, and they bring a lot of that arcade style, nitrous fueled racing action back. Racing down snow and ice covered tracks, skidding along a turn and narrowly avoiding plummeting off the edge of a cliff face is exhilarating. Weaving through traffic on a crowded freeway feels tense and frightening.
Throughout the campaign, the scenery and gameplay constantly change as you race from coast to coast. There's a good balance of different race types. You'll go from a standard eight car race, to a checkpoint time attack, to a one on one mountain drifting battle, to a cop chase. It's very rare that the same type of race repeats twice in a row. The driving can feel floaty at times, but the car classes perform differently, and getting a good time can largely depend on good car choice. On the Normal difficulty the racer AI is, well, kind of dumb. They'll crash into other cars, police will target only you, and they'll miss shortcuts, even if you enter one right in front of them.

The locales are definitely best part of this Need for Speed. In fact, The Run has some of the most gorgeous and interesting set pieces I've seen in a racing game. The Rockies, Yosemite National Park, San Francisco, even the New Jersey Turnpike are all lifelike and well detailed. Which is why it's a shame that so many of the tracks in The Run are boring. To be fair, they mostly match up with the areas of the country that are boring, too (sorry, the Midwest). But even some tracks that should be amazing, like the final battle race in New York City, are entirely underwhelming.

More than that, though, my biggest problem with The Run is the lack of options. I don't just mean the inability to customize and upgrade cars (which I personally don't mind, but is a big concern for many fans), but more that I can't fine tune my racing experience. After the campaign there is a Challenge Series which offers additional gameplay, similar to Shift's challenges. However, there is no free race option at all in this game. Whether I'm playing by myself, or online, I have to choose from the preset Challenges with their car types and rules. Beyond the dumb story, the unintuitive way to switch cars, and any problems I have with the AI, it's these lack of features that turns The Run from my racing game of the holiday, to a weekend rental. I beat the challenges, I beat the story, and now I don't have a lot more to go through.
Part of the problem stems from how scripted the campaign feels. There are cop chases where all your competitors get stopped by roadblocks. Survival races where you just have to not crash. And the final climactic race has multiple sections where it doesn't matter what you do, you get a scripted event. I can blaze ahead of the opponent, but suddenly he's at my side to show a cutscene and push me off the road. If there was an awesome story being told then maybe these would make more sense, but usually it feels like the game is holding your hand.

And it's a problem because otherwise the online is set up great. I like how I earn bonus XP for nearly everything I might do in a race. I love that AutoLog is back so I can constantly compare race times with my friends. The playlists work well and the racing was nearly lag free in my albeit limited exposure to it. But then I'm limited to picking between exotic sprints or a muscle car challenge and my interest wanes.
The story itself is rather baffling, too. The Run exists in a world where subway trains travel at 140 mph and every girl is a smoking hot maybe-lesbian. You play as Jack, a guy who got in trouble with the mob, so he enters a cross country race to get a bunch of money. That's pretty much all the story you get. The writers never extrapolate on why Jack is in trouble, or who the other racers are (aside from a couple superfluous loading screen bios). And it's all stuff that needs answers because Jack appears to be in some deep sh--.

Hey game, do you want to explain what Jack did to make the Chicago mob track him down in California, try to execute him, chase him all the way across the country, try to gun him down on a crowded freeway, get a helicopter to shoot him down (killing civilians and cops in the process), destroy an oil refinery, and send in a mob boss's son to finish the job? No? Ok then. Then why did you bother putting a story in here at all?
CLOSING COMMENTS
Need for Speed: The Run has a good racer inside it. It can be exciting and visceral, and there were numerous times in the game where I stopped and said, "Sh--, that was cool." But all this awesome racing action gets somewhat lost amid the nonexistent story, the dumb/scripted AI, the lack of options, and the overall shortness of the game. The Run is not a marathon racing game, it's a quick and dirty drag race.

The Good
Diverse assortment of cars that handle well Gorgeous, varied courses modeled on real locations A good number of race types keeps events enjoyable.
The Bad
Lengthy load times sap sense of momentum Quick-time events and mob chases aren't enjoyable Frustrating limitations on returning to the cross-country race.

There's a whole lot of America between San Francisco and New York City. Need for Speed: The Run's greatest achievement is the way it sometimes captures the thrill of hitting the open road and experiencing the varied beauty of the American landscape, from the mountains and the prairies to the small towns and skyscrapers. Unfortunately, issues arise that sap some of the momentum from your cross-country trek, but The Run spends enough time doing what it does best to remain an enjoyable journey.

Yosemite is gorgeous. Too bad you don't have time for a hike.
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You play as Jack Rourke, a racer who has gotten in way over his head with the mob. His friend Sam promises an end to his problems if he can win a cross-country street race and the huge payout that comes with victory. Sadly, The Run's attempts to make you care about Jack's plight fall flat. The talents of actors Sean Faris and Christina Hendricks as Jack and Sam are wasted; their voices emanate from character models with mouths that move oddly and faces that express no emotion. What's more, the story doesn't even make sense. Certain rivals whom you pass early in the race show up again when you're in the home stretch. Thankfully, after an early cutscene that sets up the premise, the game wastes little time with its flimsy storytelling and lets you focus on driving.

The cars in The Run feel good to drive. The wide range of vehicles on offer includes sports cars that respond tightly to your every command and muscle cars that are tough to tame, but regardless of what you're driving, racing in The Run is about balancing speed with control. Sure, you've got highways on which you can gun the throttle and cruise at top speed, but more often than not, you're on stretches of road with some tricky turns. Using your brakes effectively, maintaining a smart racing line, and speedily exiting the turns is crucial to maintaining a good time, and it feels great to put these powerful cars through their paces.

Unfortunately, you may sometimes find yourself in the wrong car for the job. With a few story-related exceptions, Jack can only change cars at gas stations, and in some stretches, these are few and far between. As a result, you may get into a muscle car to power through a stretch of highway, only to wind up facing a particularly twisty road that the muscle car is not ideal for in the next event. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that there's no easy way to return to an earlier event that offered a gas station and choose a different car. If there's no gas station in your current event, you're stuck, and must make do with what you're driving.

Dust storms in Death Valley are among the environmental hazards you encounter.
Jack's got to make the entire drive from San Francisco to New York, but of course, you're only responsible for driving a few hundred miles of that journey. The Run keeps the pressure on in each event by requiring you to meet one of a few objectives. On some stretches of road, you need to pass a certain number of other racers before reaching the finish line. In other events--called battle races--you also need to pass opponents, but here, you need to face them one at a time, getting ahead of one before a timer reaches zero and then moving on to the next. And some events are checkpoint races; just you against the clock. Many events are challenging tests of your driving talents, and it's a thrill to pass a checkpoint in the nick of time or slingshot past an opponent in the final stretch of a race.

It's not just the cars themselves that make driving in The Run enjoyable. It's also the places you go. Starting in San Francisco, your path takes you through Yosemite National Park, the Rocky Mountains, downtown Chicago, and plenty of other locations. The roads in The Run aren't entirely faithful to the real roads that inspired them, but they admirably evoke the beauty one might witness on a scenic trip across the United States. From driving in the Las Vegas dusk to speeding across the rolling Nebraska plains, the varied surroundings for your travels convey the feeling that you're covering a lot of ground, and part of the fun lies in seeing what richly detailed natural or urban landscape you'll be driving in next.
You need to contend with more than just your aggressive fellow racers as you travel through these beautiful settings. In some events, police try to stop you by doing brake checks and setting up roadblocks. You can hear their chatter, though, and see upcoming roadblocks on your minimap, so while it's fun to trade paint with these officers, they don't pose much of a threat. Then there are environmental hazards, such as an avalanche that occurs as you're heading down a mountain. Like the cops, these events aren't likely to cause you much trouble, but they make for an impressive spectacle.

San Francisco is just the beginning.
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Unfortunately, as exciting as the racing can be, it's too often interrupted. When you wreck or go too far off the road, you're automatically reset to the last checkpoint you passed, and these resets can take several seconds. It's especially frustrating when these interruptions occur after your car goes ever so slightly off the asphalt. In some places, you can go off road without penalty; in others, even a slight deviation from the course immediately triggers a reset. These interruptions, coupled with the long load times that occur before races and for resets, sap some of the speed from a game that's all about forward momentum.

Other interruptions come in the form of The Run's much-publicized on-foot sequences. These extended quick-time events make up a small part of the game, which is good because they're not much fun. There are also a few sections of The Run where you need to worry more about avoiding gunfire from mafia cars and helicopters than racing effectively. These attempts to bring some Hollywood excitement to The Run backfire; it's just not enjoyable to constantly swerve to avoid the attacks of your mob pursuers.

Your total clocked, competitive time driving coast to coast will probably be a little more than two hours, though that doesn't factor in checkpoint resets and events you fail and need to redo. The Autolog system tries to fuel the fires of competition by constantly showing you how you're stacking up against your friends. But unfortunately, the game doesn't make returning to the cross-country race a welcoming experience. You can't jump to individual events; rather, you need to replay entire stages, which are collections of anywhere from four to seven events. This means you also need to replay any on-foot sequences and rewatch any cutscenes that occur in that stage. It's enough to make the prospect of hitting the road again a lot less attractive. You can also put your skills to the test by trying to earn medals in a series of single-player challenges that you unlock as you make your way across the country, and success here can unlock new cars for you to use on the cross-country run itself.

Famous buildings and other landmarks make the environments feel authentic.
Racing online against human opponents is more exciting than revisiting the single-player experience. Online races are divided into playlists that are centered on things like urban-street racing and muscle-car battles, so you can easily jump right into the kind of action you want, though you're locked out of a few playlists until you complete a certain number of multiplayer objectives on other playlists. These objectives include things like completing three passes using nitrous and placing fifth or better in three races, and it doesn't take long to open up all of the playlists. Flaws do mar the experience--your opponents' cars sometimes teleport around the road a bit or appear to fly through the air unrealistically--but it's nonetheless satisfying to leave human players in your dust.

It's frustrating, though, that whether you're playing solo or multiplayer, distracting text constantly appears onscreen to inform you that you just earned 30 experience points for drifting or 50 XPs for cleanly passing an opponent. Early on, you unlock driver abilities like nitrous and drafting with XPs, but once that's out of the way, most of the rewards you earn are just new icons and backgrounds for your Autolog profile. This makes the XP system seem entirely unnecessary, nothing more than a hollow way for the game to try to keep you playing.

Don't worry; the on-foot sequences make up a very small percentage of the game.
It's a shame that The Run doesn't deliver more fully on the potential of its premise. It's bogged down by unnecessary quick-time events and annoying mob chases, a halfhearted attempt to tell a story, and frustrating interruptions to your racing. In spite of these burdens, the game frequently makes you feel like you're tearing across the varied terrain of this vast and majestic country. There are enough of these good moments--moments when you put the pedal to the metal on a desert straightaway or nail a hairpin turn on a twisty mountain road--to make this a road trip worth taking.

EA has essentially split off their venerable Need for Speed line between the simulation-centric Shift series and the less real-world style of Hot Pursuit, and their latest, Need for Speed: The Run, falls squarely in the latter category. Unfortunately, this puts it in direct competition with the previous game in the series, which doesn't do The Run any favors.

Run, Run, Run!

That's not to say Need for Speed: The Run is bad. There are actually miles of fun to be had here, but developer Black Box's creation definitely comes up short in comparison to the slick, gorgeous, and nearly pristine driving of Hot Pursuit. The Run is decidedly focused on the cinematic, complete with an exciting escape from a car crusher to jump-start the action at the start of the game.

It seems The Run's protagonist is in trouble with some bad people over gambling debts, but he's given the chance to correct the situation thanks to an illegal cross-country race. With a purse of $25 million, over 200 racers are in line to go the distance from San Francisco to New York City, and the aim of the game is to constantly move up in the rankings.

The first major goal is hit Vegas in the 150th position and next up is Chicago in the top 50. As a result of this placement focus, every race is either about passing a specific number of competitors or beating the clock (or both). What that really boils down to is that players have to be in first place for every single race.

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Road Rage

The Run is divided up into 10 main stages, each containing numerous races. Some of the races are boss fights, where players must beat a specific character to the finish line. Others are pure timed races where they must hit check points before time runs down, but most are just about passing X number of cars to make it to the finish line first.

The upside of this design is the level of excitement and challenge. Races in The Run can be thrilling as players struggle to avoid traffic, the cops, and other racers to be number one. The handling of each car is refined, and the game conveniently rates each car's handling difficulty, so experienced drivers can go straight for the unruly super cars, while more casual players can stick to the easier rides.

Cars can be swapped out at gas stations, and there's no other way to switch vehicles between races. So, players can potentially end up temporarily stuck with the wrong machine for the job because they didn't swap cars earlier. Each race has a limited number of checkpoint-based restarts as well. It's not a rewind as in Hot Pursuit or Forza, which seems like an odd step backwards.

While the controls are tight and responsive, especially with the easier to handle cars, there's a lot of little nagging issues in The Run that hold it back. The sudden use of cinematic displays to show cops or crashes is entirely jarring in the middle of a race and can't be turned off. Worse, it occasionally causes uncontrollable crashes.

Frostbitten

In general, the AI works, but there are plenty of odd imbalances. The other racers are incredibly aggressive and think nothing of bashing into the player (though not each other), and civilian traffic is frequently completely illogical. In cities, they'll take sudden turns with no warning from the wrong lane, or just get hung up on obstacles.

This is the second game to use DICE's Frostbite 2 engine and, much like Battlefield 3, won't bowl anyone over on consoles. The visuals suffer from a sudden lack of focus as the road goes into the horizon. There's no pop-up at all, but the yellow lines get blurry much too close to the forefront of the screen and the details of distant objects are rather muddled.

Many of the tracks actually obscure the player's view on purpose. Blinding sun is common and some tracks have massive dust or snow storms that can make avoiding police blockades frustrating. Finally, there are occasions when The Run steps out of the car, leading to on-foot cinematic chase sequences broken up by sudden quick-time event button presses. QTE gameplay in general is well past its prime, and these few segments just drag the game down.

Multiplayer racers will appreciate the superb online options, including an array of themed racing events available for online competition complete with personal achievement tracking and random rewards for racing. The inclusion of EA's Autolog also makes certain players can keep track of any friends playing the game (and vice versa), though having to wait for this service to connect every time the game loads is intrusive.

In Hot Pursuit

Need for Speed: The Run has a lot to offer-over 70 events, including challenge races outside the main game, a large selection of cars with excellent handling characteristics, and some truly intense driving. Unfortunately, there are minor nagging issues at nearly every turn, from the graphic back step and inconsistent AI to the dogged and tiring focus on simply placing first in nearly every race. The Run is a good racing game at heart, but simply doesn't live up to the legacy of its predecessor.