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Need for Speed: The Run

Need for Speed: The Run

Black Box's last game, Need for Speed: Undercover, flopped, in both sales and critical verdicts.

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HQ

I handed out the grade 5 / 10 in my review. The game was packed with annoying flaws, the graphics scrubby, the technology behind the racing poor the experience hollow, the variation poor.

Need for Speed: The Run

Staff discussion kept coming round to the same point: something in Need for Speed needed to change. It turned out that EA had thought the same thing.

Enter Burnout's Criterion. The master of explosive arcade racing and a better skill-set for graphics and tech gave us Hot Pursuit: a sprawling title that mixed the base concept of the NFS series with Burnout. Hot Pursuit a breath of fresh air in a game series that was propping itself on old merits.

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Black Box has worked for almost three years on Need for Speed: The Run. An expensive project that feels both continuation of Hot Pursuit and setback. Mission-based drives against computer opponents are on the menu again, but the main course doesn't taste quite nice.

Need for Speed: The Run

The Run's story revolves around Jack Rourke. A reckless man in fashionable Persol glasses who has ended up on the wrong side of a ruthless crime syndicate and now has to pony up 25 million dollars.

To scrape it together, and live to tell the tale, Jack signs on for The Run, a Gumball-style road race that goes from San Francisco to New York. 2000 miles, 200 participants, winding roads and a rabid police force standing between Jack and prize money of 25 million, and this is where the game begins.

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It starts okay. Jack fights, runs and throw himself into a Mustang GT500, burns through the streets of San Francisco, wires around the corner of Union Square and begins his journey to New York. On the way there, he must participate in hundreds of mini-missions that orbit between running past sufficient number of opponents within a limited period, bumping down a certain number of police cars or avoid the machine gun fire from an aggressive FBI helicopter.

Sounds fun? True, but in execution it isn't. The Run's much more ambitious than Need for Speed: Undercover, but sadly not better.

Need for Speed: The Run

Car physics in Need for Speed: The Run are remarkably incoherent. Compared with Hot Pursuit, Black Box has failed in attributing weight to almost all of the game's 122 cars. At first it feels like driving a car weighing 5000 kg, with collisions almost impossible to escape no matter how fast you react, while hammering the handbrake is the same as slowing immediately to a completely stop.

Why it's chosen to create such a dull and slow sticky driving feel in a game that is supposed to offer quick and easy arcade racing is beyond me. It doesn't help that the AI behaviour eschews any illusion of human opposition.

For example, activating the nitro function is useless, as the Turbo Boost seems to rub off on your nearest competitors, the only effect signalling your supposed-acceleration a zoomed out camera angle - both your car and opponents seem unmoved by the nitrous oxide pumping through your cylinders.

At several points on each route, there are a number of small turnings, or shortcuts. These are mostly gravel roads and even if you drive a Mustang Shelby GT500 with slicks on, it is clearly easier to control the car on gravel than on the dry, hot asphalt. This, if anything, is the ultimate proof that Black Box has failed pretty rough with the car physics.

Need for Speed: The Run

Besides strange opponents in polished sports cars, Jack must also contend with the police force during his trip to New York. The police are normally faster than everything else and just like in Hot Pursuit are incredibly aggressive.

Rubbing paint with police chasers at 250 km/h would be enjoyable, if not for the fact that your car feels like a lead bar with wheels.

Driving past the police blockade at full speed would have be great, if it were not for that every barrier contains only a narrow passage between the three parked police vehicles. Something that contributes a great sense of frustration, given you often haven't the time to see which of the three barriers didn't have a parked car behind it.

There are many features in the game that feel wrong. So many design choices that irritate and so many details that feel stupid that you almost choke.

Such as collect extra life in order to be able to restart after the police blockade collision. Restarts are activated automatically, and their number is limited. Trying to be careful with them is impossible because the game decides when a sequence is restarted.

Example: on one route I was tasked to shake off the cops. No problem. Yet reaching the end of the mission, a police car appeared from nowhere at rocket speed, punching my car from the side and wrapping it around the nearest tree.

The crash saw the game automatically use one of my extra lives, and set me back some 800 meters before the incident. 800 meters later the same thing happens again. The police are apparently pre-programmed. Third time, the same, even as I've already started to react before the car appears.

Need for Speed: The Run

The fourth time this happens I stomp on the brakes from the first second the game restarts. But it does not matter. The police are waiting then, out of nowhere. I manage to escape by slowing right down, but now my "Reset" functions almost over finished before I've reached the end of the track. Cue one more crash and I have to start the entire sequence over again.

I needn't emphasise this frustrating system so heavily; but do so anyway. It feels as if its haphazardly drawn inspiration from Criterion's Burnout titles, but implemented in an ad hoc manner. That it takes ten seconds to reset back to the start hardly makes it less irritating.

The next thing that I really dislike in Need for Speed: The Run is the story elements, and the Quick Time Event-based cutscenes that are thought to contribute a little Hollywood bombast to missions.

Between the different races, and especially those times when Jack reaches a larger city like Las Vegas or Chicago - he ends up in trouble, jams his car and had to run away (or fight with) parts of the local police force. Action pieces are exclusively designed as "interactive cutscenes" in which Jack always rely on the player's reaction time. Even if you can stomach QTEs - you have to admit a sillier element to a racing game cannot be found.

Need for Speed: The Run

Then there's the visuals. The Run is the first game after Battlefield 3 to use the Swedish-developed graphics technology Frostbite 2, and its clear how much more powerful and different this engine is to what was used in Need for Speed: Undercover.

Detailed models and nicely lit roads impress. Unfortunately the frame rate is unstable and jumpy at times - particularly in the most crucial seconds of a last tough hairpin curve, or shortly after a rabid police vehicle starts attacking.

As for the audio Black Box has done an okay job. Music selection is better than ever with more guitar rock and emo-nonsense than in previous games in the series. Engine roar is decent, though there's too much similarity between many of the rides.

Need for Speed: The Run

In the case of multiplayer component in The Run, I had hoped for more than what is offered here. It is certainly more fun to compete against human opponents over the campaign's stupid enemy cars, but the tracks remain bland and car physics remains poor. Autolog is brilliant, however and something I hope that EA will continue to build on.

The idea for The Run was a very good one. An action-packed road race from San Francisco to New York using the graphics engine of Battlefield 3. In advance, it sounded superb. The result is not, but actually one of this year's biggest disappointments. Racing is clumsy and dull. The on-foot sequences are overly cheesy and the QTE elements are extremely irritating. Compared with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, this is a step back. Compared with Burnout Paradise, this is a joke.

HQ
05 Gamereactor UK
5 / 10
+
Sometimes superb graphics, great music selection, nice cars, good environmental variation
-
Hard and stiff car physics, poor artificial intelligence, hopeless, monotonous challenges, unstable frame rate.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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