Games Grid: Need For Speed: The Run Review

The Need For Speed series of games have a few cinema-inspired entries under their wing now, it seems clear that they have a decent handle on putting the player in a gritty fantasy world of underground racing, battling cops and rival drivers for territory, cash, and pink slips to fantastic cars. Need For Speed: The Run is a slight departure from this formula, putting the players in the driver’s seat as Jack, a wheelman in a cannonball run-like race from California to New York. There are the usual hazards on the road to victory, but this time around NFS makes one thing clear: Jack’s racing for his life.

The peril is immediately apparent as Jack awakes inside a Porsche suspended aloft by a junkyard crane while the well blown-out gentlemen he has upset prepare to drop him in an awaiting crusher. This kicks off two new sequences that The Run brings to the franchise: a quicktime event to smash Jack out of the proverbial frying pan, only to place him directly into the fire, and by fire I mean the crossfire of the goons shooting from Porsche Cheyennes at the car the escaping player has commandeered, an event that will come to repeat itself a handful of times as the game goes on. An attractive benefactor then buys in Jack’s stake in a cross country all-or-nothing race where the only way to get the cash and appease his pursuers is to win.

Pick one of the starting cars and the race is on. Players will start in San Francisco and proceed through different stages to advance. As the player wins a stage, the other racers are eliminated, narrowing the tournament down to just a skilled few and, ultimately, one victor. Each stage is made up of different point-to-point races that don’t really deviate from what we’ve seen in previous NFS titles, most notably the latest Hot Pursuit. Most  are made up of standard races where winning is all that counts. Other races throw in police pursuit to crank up the intensity, while a third mode has you eliminate opponents one by one by passing them and staying ahead for a fixed time until you are the last one standing. These race modes can be exciting and each environment brings new challenges, but stage after stage, it certainly feels like a cross-country trip, in that the monotonous driving starts to wear thin after the first few major cities.

 

Also, you have to win, which is of course the ultimate point, but you have to win each and every race to advance. Since the whole endeavor is broken up in stages, it would be more satisfying if the player was responsible for making up places if they fell behind.  The game does artificially throw in moments like this, but they’re little more than a clip of dialogue saying “Floor it, we have to make up lost time!” at the start of another standard race.

Car control is arcade like in The Run and differs little from any NFS title developed in the past few years. Some physics are in play while others seem to take a vacation e.g., I have two wheels on a dirt surface which slows me down and pulls my car to the side while the ability to draft is a reward for leveling my character. Leveling up your driver unlocks different abilities, most of which are available standard features in previous NFS iterations, like nitrous and the filling of nitrous by performing aggressive maneuvers. You gain experience points (XP) during races in various methods like power sliding and also at the end of each race. Drafting, the ability to pick up speed by entering another cars slip stream, is one such unlock, so your car doesn’t fully adhere to the laws of aerodynamics until you’ve earned enough XP. Actually, not even then, because drafting doesn’t even work normally at that point either. When you draft in The Run, instead of gaining speed, a draft meter fills up, and once it does, it suddenly slingshots you forward when full. Without input, I might add, so be prepared to be drafting desperately to get around a supercar and then suddenly having your ride fired like a cannonball clear off the road because your meter filled right at a sharp bend.

All damage suffered in The Run is cosmetic. I normally like some indication that the car has hit something, but in this, it’s just too much. Every hit or tap causes major damage and the way the game is laid out, with opponents smashing you, civilian traffic slamming into you, and bouncing through the environment, its nigh-impossible to get through a race without a completely wrecked car. I realize it’s all part of the “in your face, no holds barred, adrenaline fueled ” attitude of the title, but it’s an exercise in tedium. I play racing games as clean as possible and, in fairness, XP is earned from clean passes, but it’s small comfort. The cars you like and work hard to unlock, beautifully rendered and painstakingly recreated in this game, will be played as ugly, brutally twisted wrecks for 98% of the game.

 

The sporadic in-car cutscenes let us get to know Jack a bit further, but the character development doesn’t go any deeper than his confidence in his driving skills, which amount to little more than smarmy comments made to himself followed by a sly grin. Go see a James Bond film and listen out for someone attempt to emulate 007’s cool witticisms afterward and you’ll get an idea of how effective his cleverness comes off. Some accidental depth can be eked out when contrasting these moments with any other time Jack isn’t in the car and forced into other scenarios of varying danger. You can build a story in your head where Jack’s only true place of security is alone inside a car because he’s too awkward out in the world he lives in, even to the last spoken line of dialogue at the end. Think Jack is the cool character used to dealing with sketchy characters? Watch him babble and freak out when meeting a contact. Run into some attractive race competitors at a gas station? Jack will literally gawk open-mouthed like an internet tough guy in the presence of the opposite sex.

The other times Jack emerges from the car are for the quicktime events meant to amp up the tension in different parts of the game. They pretty much amount to hitting the right sequence of buttons to narrowly escape danger or tapping a button for Jack to hot-foot it to safety. Apart from a chance to change cars, the sequences don’t really bring much to The Run, especially when in my test, one of these sequences glitched and the on-screen button prompts rendered only pixel junk. I then had to do the whole sequence by trial and error, guessing which buttons to push while watching Jack plummet off a roof, get chewed up by dogs, and be choked out by an assailant.

Stages reach a climax with an elimination duel with a boss character or characters, supposedly exceptional drivers that are only introduced with a bio on the loading screen right before the race. The quick rundown of their reasons for entry doesn’t leave any real time to connect with them, be it to empathize or to fear them as a superior driver. With the amount of characters getting face time outside of the car, you’d think that they’d at least warrant an in-game cutscene, but it only happens once in the groan-worthy scene mentioned before where two girls wiggle their digital bits to distract Jack the mouth breather at a fuel stop. Oddly enough, while the game makes it clear that with every stage you win and the vehicles you pass in them are eliminated from the tournament, bosses make repeat appearances towards the end of the run, with the same bio and in the same car collected by you from defeating them. It’s a strange oversight in the least and a lazy attempt to flesh out the boss battles at worst. Was it too hard to make up new opponents? It’s not like they’re much more than a bio slapped onto a car, right?

Your friends are the ones who breathe life into The Run, intentionally or not. Online play has the usual races, hot pursuits, and elimination tournaments that, frankly, should have been what the main storyline featured. A unique and compelling feature that the Autolog brings, Need For Speed’s social network, is the live tracking of your friends in the single player race. Each race gives a live update of the time gaps between you and your closest competitor, compelling you to push harder and collect much needed seconds. The rival’s time and chosen car will be displayed at the end, and it becomes the more satisfying challenge. While this is surely the intention, the flip side is being able to tell at just which stage your mates became fed up with The Run and quit the game altogether.

As a fan of the Need For Speed games for many years, I’ve seen the series go through many iterations, change many hands, and take risks that may have garnered financial success yet still come under the axe of critics. The wave of the Underground games are an example of that. The series’ fearlessness is both its enduring and endearing quality. NFS isn’t afraid to revisit its own history either. They may go back to the well to recapture some of the old greatness or they may try to give one of their misses another, better shot. I would say The Run might very well be one of these misses but the concept is interesting and risky enough to warrant another chance. Don’t think of The Run as a near miss, think of it as a potential launching pad for great automotive storytelling.

Words By – Alex Kalogiannis