Over its 15-year history, EA’s Need for Speed series has tried, with varying success, to use stories to jazz up its racing and create a richer experience. Need for Speed: The Run promised to be one of the more interesting attempts, being built on the stunning Frostbite 2 engine (as used by Battlefield 3) and using a fairly appealing premise — to save your character, Jack Rourke, from being whacked by the mob, you’ve got to win an epic illegal street race that spans the American continent from San Francisco to New York.
That’s potentially a great excuse for some widely varied point-to-point tracks and blockbuster set pieces. There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Run’s racing — while it’s not groundbreaking (conforming to the typical standard races, time trials, eliminations and an occasional rival showdown), it at least offers good-looking, straightforward, arcadey fun with high-end cars and the usual nitrous and drafting elements.
Its main problems are actually story and length. The game’s plot basically flatlines for most of its middle and when it does occasionally appear, it’s most often in the guise of unwelcome quicktime events, where you’ve got to rapidly mash the correct button to prevent Rourke from being instantly killed. And it’s short overall — it took us a little over two hours to get through the single-player campaign’s 60-odd races, although we suspect there’s an extra hour in there of retries and resets.
If it has one saving grace it’s that its widely varied tracks and top-tier cars make for inviting and compelling multiplayer and perhaps surprisingly, we had no trouble finding well-populated games on the PC. If you’re only in it for the single-player experience, however, there’s not a lot of value here.
