Couple of chasers
Compounding the misery, opponents also have an uncanny knack of brushing through pile-ups and police roadblocks unscathed, while your car screeches to a grinding halt, costing you valuable seconds as you try to extricate yourself from the carnage.
Snow place like road
It's not the only waste of time, however. Not content with sharing Shift 2's penchant for lengthy and distracting crash porn, The Run also flicks to short roadside cut-scenes every time the police enter the fray, fracturing the experience and unnecessarily diverting your attention away from the demanding race conditions.
All of which is a shame, because The Run is a decent arcade racer at heart. Controls are tight and responsive, traction feels realistic and drifting plausible.
Someone call 911
And, despite customisation being strictly limited to paint jobs, the handling of each car feels distinct and refined, with muscle cars better suited to long, meandering freeways and sports cars at home on the shorter, convoluted urban tracks.
The Run's multiplayer offering is a mixed bag. Without aggressive AI and cut-scenes to contend with, racing certainly feels a lot more balanced. The bragging rights of the Autolog social network remain as addictive as ever, as does the holistic system of XP, which spans both campaign and online racing.
Follow the yellow slicked road
There's even a novel unlock system, where more advanced series are opened up by completing in-race objectives. Stripped of the distinguishing campaign narrative, however, and without a unique selling point of its own, it's ultimately just too much like any number of other racers on the grid.
Verdict
Of the three Need for Speed games, The Run feels the least well realised. There's definite potential in its concept – the unique narrative, structure and mechanics. But the game never feels more than a hastily cobbled prototype to showcase the Frostbite 2.0 engine. The picture-postcard tour across America may be stunning, but The Run's flaws spoil the view. ®
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Need for Speed: The Run
COMMENTS
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?
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.
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.
I was actually looking forward to this game
I had last read about not long after they had announced it, so I have been somewhat dismayed by the reviews and comments that this has been picking up. Which is a shame because I've always felt that a racing game based around the simple act of racing from one side of a country to the other while avoiding the police and other road traffic would make for a very good game. I imagine a starting point where one has a number of serious of cars to pick from, say 50, all well programmed and designed to fully accentuate their real world differences. From there, there is the case of choosing the route, with say just a few jokers allowed to be played for changing this in the course of the game. Of course we would have to plan fuel stops, oil changes, tyre changes etc as well. With a unified start and finish point and a minimum distance to be covered and a well reproduced game world you could really have some fun with this. And then you're off! With say a maximum of 18 cars per race and if you kept it so that one type of car could only be used by two racers maximum it would ensure a very mixed grid and range of opponents
I imagine that you could play persistent online races as well, where a group of say 3 to 12 could compete in the same race with all progress saved between stages and the race only continued when all the competitors were online and available. And yes the same limitations on the number and types of cars would be carried over from the single game.
Obviously a lot of this is going to be against the clock, but sooner or later the cars are going to passing down the same road at the same time and so the racing against others would possible. Maybe for some parts of the route all cars could follow the same route and then the stages could run like the Tour de France with points awarded for "sprint winners". Once one country was finished then it would be off to the next! Racing across Russia from East to West would be fun!
The game must make the distances true though, of course, otherwise the whole point of the game would be lost!
Mine is the green anorak with the map covered with fuel economy figures in inside pocket.
Count me out
Yet another "driving" game where the AI opponents magically suffer none of the issues the player is confronted with, and the player has to succeed perfectly in every aspect if he is to have a chance to win.
And they call that a GAME ?
Sorry guys, for me a game is something that amuses me. Constant frustration does not amuse me, and it seems this title has it in spades.
So I'll stick with NFS Porsche 2000, thank you. It's graphics may be dated, but it seems that its gameplay remains best-of-breed.
