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Need for Speed: The Run

Need for Speed: The Run

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Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Review Releasing a driving game into an already congested market is a risky endeavour for any developer. So it follows that releasing two within six months could be considered careless. But to release three within a year, as EA has now done, seems at best illogical and, at worst, pure cannibalistic folly.

Need for Speed: The Run

Downhill tussle

EA's justification for foisting three separate Need for Speeds on gamers in 12 months seems to be that we're all individuals. I might prefer the cat-and-mouse frivolity of Hot Pursuit and you the claustrophobic tussles and vertebrae-shattering physics of Shift 2, so it stands to good reason that a third game might prefer a more cinematic, narrative-injected racer.

First impressions of The Run lend credence to that logic. An interesting – if derivative – premise places you in the driving seat as Jack Rourke, a marked man racing for survival.

Need for Speed: The Run

Ice to beat you

A compulsive gambler, Jack owes a life-shortening debt to the mob. The only way to avoid sleeping with the fishes is to compete in 'The Run', a Gumball Rally-style street race from San Francisco to New York.

Finish first, and you'll not only pick up a slice of the $25m purse from your backers, they'll also help get the mob off your back. Finish anywhere else and all you'll win is a pair of concrete slippers and a long walk off a short pier.

Need for Speed: The Run

Driving up the dirty pass

Delivered through cinematic cut-scenes - and, oddly, a couple of woeful QTE foot chases - the story is intended to appeal to gamers unmotivated by split times and chequered flags alone. But while the narrative wrapper superficially distinguishes The Run from its Need for Speed stablemates, it soon proves mere window dressing for the game's generic event types.

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Next page: Whacky races

Still chavvy?

I was put of the N4S franchise a decade ago - I liked the driving but the whole chav vibe of pimping my car really annoyed me.

Is this still the background to the games, or have they grown up and the N4S name is more a brand than anything else?

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Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed

came out around 2000, it had *really* accurate physics, and a bunch of Porsches from the 356 on. This is what I want out of a car racing game, one where the cars drive like cars. Out of the cars it had, I found the 944 the easiest to drive fast (actually due to it having *less* power -- the 911 is real easy to break the tires lose on a turn, then really easy for it to go *really* out of control after that ... the 944, you have a wide range of throttle to control that with.)

Although I must admit to having enjoyed NFS3: Hot Pursuit. It's amazing how car tech has advanced since then, it had some grade A muscle from that era and it'd just about top out at 130.

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More crap from EA

Yet more arcade crap from EA. Can i have my Porsche's back where they are deserved now? i.e. Forza 4.

Kthxbye.

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