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.
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.
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.
