Need for Speed: The Run

The Run's main game is based upon an illegal street race starting from San Francisco and ending up in New York. Your character is Jack Rourke, who is in debt to a mob, so on the advice of his friend Sam, signs up to The Run in order to win enough cash to get himself out of trouble.

Instead of being one large endurance race, it is split up into many short races with various objectives. Objectives may involve time trail type race, to overtake the several opponents, race one on one in a rival race, or escape the police. The races are fairly short and failing the objective forces you to restart. A lot of races require you to reach a checkpoint within a certain time, and you have a limited amount of Rewinds that take you back to the previous checkpoint. Rewinds are also forced if you wreck your car, which can happen if you venture off course,or hit an oncoming vehicle. Run out of Rewinds and you have to start the whole race over.

Sadly, the loading times are some of the biggest I've come across. The Rewind loading times take several seconds, but you are waiting a minute for the actual race to load. Due to the way the game is structured, it almost feels like it has more loading screens than game time which severely hinders your enjoyment of the game.

The races themselves are decent enough, but there is far too many breaks within and it would have been nice to have longer races or more freedom to actually finish sections without coming first. The track designs are usually fairly simple due to being based on motorways, so the track has slight bends rather than dramatic hair-pins. The races are therefore played at high speeds, and using the boost feature is necessary to keep ahead. This is gained in general driving and extra bonuses are awarded for drifting, drafting and near misses. There are short-cuts marked on the map in orange and sometimes it's almost necessary to use them to meet the time limits.

Although you spend long periods in the same car, at certain points of the story you are forced to switch, and if you keep an eye out, some courses have petrol stations which allow you to change when you want.

For a bit of variety, there's a few story sequences which use quick-time events to escape from danger. In some sections, you can actually fail the quick-time event and still proceed and see a different, but successful outcome due to branching paths in the sequence.

In many races, there's plenty of police trying to get in your way, and you need to listen in to the police dialogue to be warned of upcoming roadblocks. In some races, the mob are on your trail, either by car or helicopter chases.

Overall, The Run is a decent enough game, but I feel there's better alternative arcade racers out there such as Ridge Racer Unbounded.