Have you ever heard of a movie called “Cannonball”? It stared the late David Carradine where you have to drive a coast to coast race ending with the winner receiving a big pot of money. The cool part is “Need For Speed the Run” takes that same concept and gives it a modern day feel towards it giving us race fans a high plot action racing game, but is it just a blessing in disguise? Time to pop that clutch and hang on because we going full throttle into this review people!
The game starts off where you are in a messed up situation. You play as Jack, he wakes up strapped to a car about to be crushed by some mob dudes and you have to escape or face death. Need for Speed, as always, starts the story off with something intense, which makes you want to survive constantly. Luckily, there is a nice prize at the end of the journey and of course a beautiful female partner giving you orders. The plot is has you racing from San Francisco to New York. First place wins you twenty-five million dollars. The crazy side of all this is that you starts off at 211th place with mob and cops chasing you throughout your journey. I hope you know how to drive well!
Need For Speed feels like a big Michael Bay (ironically he did the trailer for the game) movie on its own, with a twist of the Hot Pursuit game. Their cars are preset and ready for you to take to the streets, so it is all about choosing which car bests suits each area. There is no tuning to worry about, just pick the color, the body kit and drive. NFS: The Run, has a hefty amount of cars to use to bad they couldn’t get the rights to the Ferrari. The Need for Speed veterans like myself are rewarded with special edition cars like their other games. The game has a fighting game feel to it which is a nice change from the normal racing games. The option in the game allow you to set up a profile with different icons, backgrounds and a motto for other racers to see, which is cool when racing online.
The “Autolog” feature makes a come back in NFS: The Run. Quite frankly it will never leave the series, the way its utilized in the series is a great way to challenge and taunt your opponents while dominating the tracks in multi-player. Multi-player does not change at all with different challenge series, one on one matches and up to 16 players races. Fair warning those online people are relentless, be prepared to be salty a lot during your career.
Here is where I rage about the game, honestly I was very disappointed. This totally sucks because at first I was enjoying it until I got further into the game. The problem is that the NFS series never grew from “Most Wanted” which is still the best NFS game out there to date. First, there is no customization option, every car is preset to be a certain speed. That option is important because if you really gave gamers the option to tune their car and actually keeping the car which could possibly help you finish the race or change cars during certain sequences if needed. If those features were still in the game then it would have been a lot more intense. The game holds your hand WAY too much! Basically if you go off the path a bit it will not let you figure out how to recover from your mistake to get back into the race. The game will reset you using UP whenever you go “off course” and its not cool. I agree with one of my TwitchTV viewers “Nterror”, it should only happen when you wreck! I would like to ask, “Where is the challenge in the game?” Not even an hour into the story, my brother “Drakaz” pointed out that the game is fixed for you to win. At first I didn’t understand what he was talking about, until I realized that if you do not finish each area not reaching your goal, it will make you try again instead of letting you make it up in the next area. I mean really? That would make the game a lot better for you to have that kind of feature to make up your lost time to keep going. Whatever number you finished at will either be a hit or miss and then save that for boss fight. I say keep the speed walls and have a mode for cops to chase you i.e. MOST WANTED!
I am not done yet! I like how they tried to add sex appeal to the game with the Sports Illustrated models, however if you are going to have hot female racers in the game, make sure they give me a challenge or I will be left bored and find them as useless as a gasoline flavored lollipop! My friend Erika can give me a better race in her Nissan 240zx than these models! I give them kudos for the awesome action sequences in the vast areas across America and having the “Quick Time Events” was a great touch being used for the first time in the franchise, but frankly the ending was such a disappointment and a cop out (no spoilers from me). I was looking forward to this like Christmas morning, but in the end all I got was a lump of coal!
It’s apparent that I did not like this version of the NFS series and I am going to say it’s a “Rent”. I have to say EA suckered me into what I believe was going to be something bringing me back to the ‘Most Wanted’ days but sadly it was a blind date from hell. The story was awesome and it felt like a great summer block buster movie, but it left me with a blah ending and a fixed win! That was so disappointing to me. I have to say go back to other titles and see what I mean, play ‘Most Wanted’ and you will get the best racing experience for someone on the run in the history of NFS. I am Quan also known as Kuma and frankly I was salty at the end of this game, but I thank you for checking out this review and please be sure to check out my streams at twitch.tv/qbsamurai for funny commentary and interesting gaming. All right gamers I am going to cash in my winnings and take a long shower after being on the road for so long, stay frosty!
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