Need For Speed: The Run

I want to like NFS: The Run, I have played and enjoyed most of, if not all of the NFS games that have come out in the last decade. However, The Run does a few things wrong that make me angry, and I mean legitimately angry at the game. To the point that I'm not playing to enjoy myself, but to stick it to the game. That's right, I begin holding a grudge against the title. This kind of thing is probably not healthy.

It's not the car handling, or the graphics, sound, story, or anything like that. For the most part it looks good, sounds good, and the story is interesting enough to keep me playing the singleplayer races... however, there are two things it does that turn me into a frothing font of rage, swearing under my breath at the game as I play it.

The first offense is that the track design, while interesting and challenging is too damn narrow. If you go off the asphalt and onto the curb of a city street, it resets you. If your tail end swings out over the sheer drop of a cliff, threatening to drag your shiny hand-made Italian supercar into a canyon... it resets you.

In concept this is fine, I go veering off a mountainside, or into a thicket at excess of a hundred miles an hour, my racing career is effectively done for... but if my drift is a bit too wide, and I slip onto the shoulder of the highway, or touch one of the holographic track boundaries, I would like to be given a little grace period to recover my car, and redeem myself, not be reset to the last checkpoint I hit, forcing me to redo the last section of the race all over again.

Hell, I could even stand that if I didn't have a finite number of resets that, once gone, cause me to forfeit the race entirely... forcing me to restart it from the very beginning. This leads me into the second offense Need For Speed: The Run commits: This game will make you wait.

Get reset, and you have to wait 5-10 seconds for it to reset, fail a race and not only do you have to agree to start the race over (choosing 'No' just leaves you on the loss screen) you're forced to wait for the game to load the whole track over from the beginning, with any cut scenes (unskippable!) playing before you're dumped back behind the steering wheel. If you do win, which is not impossible, you're left with a slow-mo view of your car that lasts just a touch too long, and an Experience Point tally screen that could really be faster, especially when you level up and it wants to show you all the cool things it gave you. This is all made worse because you can't mash a button to speed things up. You have to wait, and bear in mind, installing the game to the 360's hard drive doesn't do much for load times.

Also... it's bad enough that when I get the chance to switch cars, not only do I lose several seconds of race-time as my opponents get ahead of me (before the race pauses) I then have to wait for the car images to load, then wait for the game to kick me back into the race. If things were a bit more seamless, and smooth I doubt I'd have any problems.

Ultimately NFS: The Run feels like something that I'd really love if the track boundaries weren't so constricting, and time spent waiting for the game to load, reset or move on wasn't so extreme.

I haven't touched multiplayer yet, and I somehow doubt I will.

Honestly, if you want a better racing game, get the earlier title Hot Pursuit. I can honestly say I enjoyed it far, far more than what I've seen of The Run, and it'll be cheaper to boot.

Bottom line: Not worth full price.