By Daniel Rutledge
When it comes to racing games, Need for Speed is at the front of the pack. Detractors will say otherwise, but clearly it's the most successful racer on the market because it's the most fun.
The Run is very fun. It had me physically moving my body as I cornered, throwing the controller down and swearing as someone beat me by a whisker and, of course, cheering with exhilaration as I later hit the nitrous to shoot past them and across the finish line.
Forza and Gran Turismo are miles ahead of this as realistic simulator racing games. While NFS has tussled with those titans a bit with its own simulator off-shoot, Shift, it's really the good old arcade action where the franchise does best.
Thankfully The Run is very much arcade style - you can hit walls to slow down and be sweet as, the physics are nice and grippy, and using your magically refilling NOS boosters makes up a huge part of the gameplay. The racing physics are far from too easy, however, and it takes a little while to get the balance of acceleration versus drifting right.
The game also pushes the arcade racer genre to a new extreme by giving it a storyline. It's just what you'd imagine from Need for Speed - illegal street-racing, super sexy performance cars and smokin' hot babes. It's the absolute other end of the spectrum from racing simulators that have you do a few laps, make slight tweaks to your vehicle, then do a few more laps, all in kind of boring ultra-realism.
You play Jack, a douchebaggy dude with terrible facial hair, as he takes part in an underground race across the USA. You've got to beat a couple of hundred other racers from San Francisco to New York to score US$25 million and pay off the mob, the cops and the babes. Or something.
The levels are just as beautiful as the premise promises. You get to enjoy looking at a wonderful range of urban and rural landscapes from across the United States and it sure is pretty. It's a shame you rarely get a chance to admire the view as you're concentrating on getting past each level.
This frustrated me a lot the first few times I played at home but I got around it by inviting a buddy over to play with me. Every time he was driving, I was supposed to be keeping an eye on the map to inform him of upcoming shortcut routes. But I wasn't very good as the co-pilot - I was constantly distracted by the strikingly gorgeous surroundings.
It all looks so damn good thanks to the mighty Frostbite 2 engine, the same thing that makes Battlefield 3 look so incredible. And it's not just used to make the world look fantastic - there be babes, too. A selling point of the game was its inclusion of Sports Illustrated models Irina Shayk and Chrissy Teigen along with Mad Men hottie Christina Hendricks.
In addition to the classic Need for Speed style race action, there's a bunch of new additional crazy stuff going on to enjoy. The epic avalanche stage shown in a trailer and which I really dug in a hands-on of the game is still probably my favourite stage, although there are a lot of other set-pieces to enjoy. I had to race through sandstorms, weave between train tracks and avoid multiple police road blocks in downtown Las Vegas.
The out-of-car sequences I quite enjoyed too. It gives a little context to each race and moves things along, generally by having Jack smashing windows, escaping from cars, dodging crashing cars and ferocious dogs as well as bashing cops and outrunning Mafia types.
In terms of acting and writing, this is about thin enough to make the Fast and Furious movies seem like Shakespeare. But it’s entertaining enough and it works - just as the weak characters and silly stories in a first-person shooter do. If you imagine a game where the cut-scenes simply propel you onto the next bit where you're shooting hundreds of dudes, this is pretty much the same thing, except you’re racing instead of shooting people. And the young boys and girls playing this will probably really get into the story a lot more than we older, more cynical folk.
Speaking of youngsters playing the game, I'm fairly surprised at the PG rating, considering the violent content in the out-of-car segments. You won't find a more anti-censorship fella than me - I firmly believe we should be able to watch A Serbian Film and Human Centipede 2 at the cinema completely uncensored if we're willing as adults. But I guess I'm of the old-fashioned belief that brutally kicking a police officer in the face and knocking him down is a joy for mature audiences only.
Anyway, back to the racing - have I emphasized how fun it is enough yet? If you're a NFS fan, you owe it to yourself to check out how awesome this one is with the epic set-pieces and interesting storyline element. If you stick the game on the easiest setting you could probably cane it from San Fran to New York in just a few hours, but why would you want to do that? There's a huge amount of thrills to be had from setting the game's difficulty at a level that matches your skill and then trying to nail difficult levels several times before succeeding. Even if you smash a level fairly easily, the autolog service will tell you what your online mates have done on the level and what you need to do in order to be the best.
I was wowed by the amazing Forza 4 earlier this year, but I have to say I had a lot more fun speeding from San Fran to NYC in The Run. For epic, action-loving racing game fans, I highly recommend it.
Four and a half stars.
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Need For Speed: The Run
:: Publisher: Electronic Arts
:: Developer: EA Black Box
:: Format: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
:: Rating: G