Need for Speed--The Run
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Diverse assortment of cars that handle well
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Gorgeous, varied courses modeled on real locations
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A good number of race types keeps events enjoyable.
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Lengthy load times sap sense of momentum
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Quick-time events and mob chases aren't enjoyable
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By
Carolyn Petit,
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