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Platform
Xbox 360
Genre
Racing
Publisher
Electronic Arts
Developer
EA Black Box
ESRB
T (Teen)
Released
November 15, 2011
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- Frostbite 2 game engine provides
plenty of destructible road hazards for an extra layer of
driving mayhem
- Although the actual goals in The Run races get repetitive, a
lot of events are highly intense racing adventures, including
the avalanche in the Rockies and the train tunnel in the home
stretch heading into New York City
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- Single-player The Run mode is
more like a full-on sprint, as the San Fran-to-NYC race can be
completed in around three hours
- Large selection of exotics and muscle cars, but not very much
of a noticeable difference in how cars handle when they race
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Review: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (360)
Review: Need for Speed: Carbon (360)
Review: Split/Second (360)
Review: Mario Kart 7 (3DS)
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Need
for Speed: The Run
Score: 8.0 / 10
There are plenty of dumb things
someone can do to put them at serious risk of extreme bodily harm. Right
near the top, just after wrestling alligators blindfolded, is incurring
a large debt with the mafia and not having any actual way of paying that
liability. That tends to get those mob guys cranky and trigger-happy.
Yet that’s just the situation that Jack Rourke, who’s never met a fast
car he didn’t want to drive even faster, finds himself thrust into in
the newest Need for Speed entry– number 18 in the long-running franchise
The Run, on the Xbox 360. Luckily, he falls into a fortuitous situation
that not only can wipe out that debt but put a few
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million in his pocket as well. A
childhood friend, the hottie redhead Sam Harper, offers to pay his
$250,000 entry fee for a spot in the San Francisco-to-New York City
underground – a very illegal car race. If he wins, she gets Rourke’s mob
“situation” absolved and he gets 10% of the winner-take-all $25 million
prize. She keeps the rest. A win for Jack, a win for Sam and a win for
the |
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mob. Everybody gets paid and happy.
But there’s the little task at hand of actually triumphing in the
2,700-mile race against 200 other wannabe winners, while avoiding cops,
the still-angry mob chasing him (and shooting at him with malicious
intent from cars and helicopters) and some rather treacherous driving
conditions.
Throughout The Run single-player mode, the plot is pretty standard fare,
and in fact is really not very deeply developed. Gamers will have very
little cut-scene viewing (along with some static info screens that give
scant information about the rival racer that gamers are facing in that
particular point of the story). Even considering that the racing is the
main focus and not the storyline, The Run is rather skimpy on story,
being more of a full-on sprint than a run, as the San Fran-to-NYC race
can be completed in around three hours.
But there are other modes to increase the replayability of Need for
Speed: The Run, including the Challenge mode, where gamers will revisit
past areas raced and look to complete challenges to unlock medals and of
course online racing. Neither mode, however, can match the
asphalt-burning intensity of the single-player The Run races.
Although
the actual goals in The Run races get repetitive (overtake a certain
number of cars, beat rivals, make up time), a lot of events are
extreme-high-speed, adrenaline-pumping racing adventures, including the
avalanche in the Rockies and the train tunnel in the home stretch
heading into New York City. There are even a few on-foot chases evading
mobsters and police just to keep the stress level elevated.
Visually, the game has a familiarity, sharing an unexpected graphical
lineage: the Frostbite 2 game engine that belongs to EA’s
biggest-selling game today, Battlefield 3. A first-person shooter
graphical engine isn’t exactly what one might expect under the hood of a
high-octane racing game, but the strength of Frostbite 2 is having
overwhelming environmental destruction possible, and there is
destruction-by-auto all over the landscape in various forms gamers will
be driving in Need for Speed: The Run (stationary items such as trees,
road signs and cargo containers to moving traffic and trains). The
environments aren’t the stars of the graphical show, however.
That celebrity status is reserved for the amazing array of real-world
cars available to race, particularly the beautiful exotics worth six
figures that most gamers can only dream of sitting behind the wheel of.
Here, however, the keys to exotic racing nirvana are handed over without
reservation, so those dreams can become a reality while driving road
beasts from legendary car creators like Lamborghini.
Controlling the cars is overall not difficult, but gamers better have
their drifting skills down, because that is used extensively on many of
Need for Speed: The Run’s courses. Curiously, while gamers will
obviously notice a difference in the speed qualities of the variety of
cars, there really isn’t much difference in how cars handle.
Although the single-player adventure runs out of fuel way too soon, the
intensity of the racing while driving beautifully rendered “dream” autos
makes up for the brevity, and a few replayable modes (Challenge and
online) greatly increases Need for Speed: The Run’s gameplay driving
distance.
– Lee Cieniawa
lcieniawa@armchairempire.com
(January 18, 2012) |
