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You can read this review in full in our print edition.
Our January issue, which is on sale December 20, will include a Post Script article that looks at the Need For Speed series' breadth and, even though it means it doesn't always hit the right note, admirable experimentalism.
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The notion that playing games is a waste of your time is nonsense, of course, but unfortunately Need For Speed: The Run lets the side down. Stuffed with a procession of long-winded loading sequences, protracted menu flipping and unskippable cutscenes, it often feels like there’s as much watching as there is playing. Time wasted, in other words.
The Run’s problems are manifold, and loading is only the most acute. In singleplayer, each stage requires a loading screen of well over a minute, the gap from one race to the next a yawning chasm. In multiplayer things are worse: loading can take anything up to five minutes, and often simply gives up altogether and remains in limbo. This is on a patched retail copy, and impossible to defend. As one online compatriot muttered while Las Vegas loaded: “You could drive there quicker than this”. Purely in terms of the respect it has for its players’ time, The Run is a failure.
Regular framerate drops and glitchy physics add to the general shonkiness, and even Autolog is spoiled. Its incorporation in The Run makes last year’s chic and slick innovation feel like an irritant, wheezing for yet more minutes between races while connecting rather than telling you anything useful.
Even ignoring these many technical failings, and despite an excellent concept, The Run still falls far short of being a good game. The idea is a non-stop race across America: San Francisco to New York, taking in Vegas and Detroit, against more than 200 other drivers. The reality is a series of short A-to-B stages that mix up their objectives but never quite hit the right balance, a disjointed presentation that turns promising-sounding stretches like The Great Lakes into disconnected vignettes.
This chopping up of the long route into smaller chunks could work if you were still responsible for your overall position in the race, but The Run never allows this, instead dictating your progression up the ranks rigidly, each stage setting a target ranking, with no wiggle room. This is in part because The Run’s singleplayer has a heavy narrative focus. This is a car game in which the driver is a character.
Inevitably, he’s an unlikeable goon who smirks his way through a mob/girl/redemption story that feels like The Fast And The Furious machinima. This might be forgivable if you could skip cutscenes, or if the occasional QTEs weren’t devoid of imagination or engagement. Instead you’re essentially playing Simon Says to unlock the next part of a video, and while the setups – escaping the police, fighting crooks – have a keen cinematic eye, any tension is wasted. Surely players expect more in 2011 than tapping ‘X’ to run?
There are three viewing angles: thirdperson, firstperson and a bonnet cam. Choosing between the first two comes down to preference, but the latter is spoilt by wavering and occasionally absent textures on the bonnet itself. Sometimes the lighting effects mix textures into strange oily swirls, while at other times it feels like you’re driving one big polygon.
The campaign’s five-hour running time is doubled by Challenge mode, which goes over the same tracks with different conditions, although, like the main game’s objectives, they rapidly begin to repeat. In both modes The Run manages to throw up high-octane sequences and the odd neat trick, but it’s all undermined by the same problem: cheating opponents.
Success in the racing genre relies on great opposition. In The Run you will catch up to racers at 180mph, only to see them accelerate away at an impossible pace. Later, these speed demons will slow to a crawl on a predefined stretch of road to allow an overtaking manoeuvre. And it gets worse. We’ve been in the lead and driving at top speed with boost engaged on a straight line to the finish, only to watch in disbelief as an opponent in the same car cruised past to steal the win. Then there are the non-racing cars on the road, which have a habit of turning directly into you for no reason and with no warning, a lousy trick that’s impossible to avoid and feels rigged. It’s a frequent and simply unforgiveable piece of rule-breaking.
Online multiplayer tops everything. The races are built around a neat structure whereby participants sign up for a short series of stages with a random prize at the end, rather than a single encounter. But in-game the races regularly suffer from framerate drops, ghosting from opposition cars, and collision physics that behave inconsistently or just don’t work at all. Sometimes it all goes very wrong: on one terrifying occasion the track just plain disappeared, leaving eight racers tumbling through a texture-free brown vacuum, chatting about how this never happened in Hot Pursuit. That The Run crashed a retail PS3 five times during our review sessions says a lot about its all-round flakiness.
Perhaps half of our online races worked as they should. For those brief snatches, The Run gives glimpses of a different game, a tight and thrilling urban racer in which cars weave loops around oncoming traffic, drift around corners and boost out with jerks of inertia. But then it’s time for another long loading screen and the taste is soon forgotten.
The Run doesn’t have the structure or production values to carry off its concept. Even if it did, its successes would be smothered by a procession of awful technical flaws. Lacking charm and polish, only the Need For Speed name will sell the game – which will no doubt mean that it fares well enough. But in a year that has seen gaming’s biggest franchises one-upping each other and demanding players’ attention like never before, The Run simply doesn’t cut it. [3]
PS3 version tested.
Comments
8The Run has problems, but the technical ones you highlight aren't anything I've experienced offline or on. I've played it since launch, completing The Run and levelling up through multiplayer and, whilst lag can affect the position of racers online, I've never had any system crashes or graphical glitches.
The criticism of the scripted AI is entirely justified, and I would add overly short stages, a pointless script, and QTEs of excruciating pointlessness. Worse, try the single player on Hard and the difficulty spikes are ludicrous. Any competent player will sail through half a dozen stages and then tear their hair out on one stage, repeating it 15-20 times, such is the poor balance.
But 3 is an excessively harsh score. It has many merits, the main one being the beauty Frostbite 2 brings to the stages. It's the first time since the 3DO original that the series has felt like a proper A to B racer, and the handling physics have, thankfully, rejected Hot Pursuit's Ridge Racer obsession for a much more grounded approach. It's not great, but it's a start in the right direction.
Are these technical issues solely the preserve of the PS3 version? I've not read of them on 360. Similarly for the loading times... could an installed 360 version fair better?
AI is clearly a problem though, as is the potted effort of each segment taking you from fixed position to fixed position in the grid, undermining the initial sense of breezy freedom the game's concept gives you.
QTEs though are not going to be a problem; they're one step advanced from a pure cinematic at least. Sort of.
I haven't experienced any of the PS3 technical issues mentioned, nor have friends. The article states it's a patched retail copy but we have had none of the aforementioned problems.
Excessive loading times seems to be a Frostbite 2 legacy. BF3 suffers the same problem, even with the optional install. Not as much of a problem when you're playing an online map in a small region, but much more jarring when your minute of loading gives you 2 minutes of racing, or less if you have to restart! For an engine that specialises in streaming detailed data to make landscapes believable, Black Box have been very unambitious in their stage length. Surely a 5 minute stage length should be an average, not an exception?
A 3 may be understandable if they've been excessively playing Mario Kart 7 or Forsa 4. Though obviously not the same, playing a great game in the same genre can seriously affect a 'lesser standard' release like this
But shouldn't a 3 indicate a totally calamitous game? The consensus from others suggests a more solid release than a dire 3.
so the makers could still put:
"Edge says - 'a tight and thrilling urban racer'"
on the front of the box!!
I didin't like your review, it not match with my View and lot of my friends who played this game.
this game it´s different, its new, flaws on PS3 version? it can be fixed and it don't take the shine of it.
people associat NSF franchise to "Underground", and if it's no Underground it won't work well
Really wanted this to be a good game. And really thought it might be. Short stages are completely the opposite of what I was hoping for. Even the Need for Speed branding won't sell me this game.
From the very start this game is a mess. From a technical standpoint, they really dropped the ball. My first problem was getting it to run in fullscreen mode. While it claimed it was already in fullscreen mode, it simply decided it wanted to run in a downscaled window instead. I had to make do with simply maximizing this window and playing it slightly downscaled.
The next problem I had was getting a controller to work. Although my controller has no A's or Y's on it, the game will assume it does and only display QTEs with such symbols. I never ended up getting this controller to work with the game and regretfully gave it up to use the keyboard instead. However it wasn't any better. The default acceleration key is A and you steer with the arrow keys. This is something I've never seen in any racing game ever and it is a very awkward way to control a car in a video game. This game is clearly made with controllers in mind, so if you don't have one or your only controller isn't an Xbox controller, you're screwed.
More technical flaws include not being able to skip the starting publisher movies (it's been years since they started doing this you'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now) not being able to skip the boring cinematics despite having seen them a dozen times already, not being able to use the mouse on the main menu, not being able to remap your controls in-game, and a hilarious slew of graphical errors drawing away from the experience. I had a good laugh when I read another review that said the graphics were "superb" and NFS: The Run is "one of the best-looking racing games ever". This is of course not true in the slightest.
The reason I have such a big problem with this game comes from my experiences of what I've already described. I initially couldn't get my controller to work with the QTEs as the buttons I was pressing was not corresponding with what I mapped them to be, which required me to exit to the main menu without saving in order to check my button mappings. This required me to sit through the boring unskippable cinematic at least six times before giving up.
By the way, QTEs should not exist in a racing game. They should not be in ANY game. Direct your own cutscenes, developers, I'm here to race. I'm pretty sure their only concern is that gamers are going to pass out from boredom during their awful cutscenes.
Lastly, my final complaint, and really this should have been the first thing I said: the entire game idea was stolen. There already exists a documentary entitled 32 Hours 7 Minutes which is about racing from New York to Los Angeles as quickly as possible. All they did was switch the destinations and add a cheesy cliched Hollywood plot line. I was massively disappointed when I found out they didn't even give the makers of said documentary any credit after stealing their idea. Electronic Arts is truly the most shameful game company in existence today and continue to shock me with the sleazy things they do in order to increase sales.
This game gets a solid 0/10 from me for causing so much rage and frustration. I can tell it was made and pushed onto the market as quickly as possible without a single thought going into the most common complaints from gamers about video games: poor controls, unskippable cutscenes, and QTEs. Save yourself the heartbreak and never play this game.