Although it was pretty much ripped apart by critics and fans alike, I decided to give the new Need For Speed a run. I’ve never been a huge fan of racing games – mainly because I suck at them – but Need For Speed games have always been far easier than your Forza types, plus most of the time they can be fun to play.

When I rented the game from LoveFilm I knew the initial story and ideas behind the game, including that it was built on the Frostbite 2 game engine. For those of you who don’t know the story you play as Jack Rourke, a twat who was involved with a criminal organisation and now owes them a large sum of money. Now on the run he teams up with Sam (voiced by the beautiful Christina Hendricks who also lent her likeness to the game) who enters him into a 3000 mile race from San Francisco to New York. Successfully overtaking 200 other opponents and coming in first will net them a tidy $25 million which will clear his debt (I think it’s around $2 million, can’t fully remember), fill Jack’s pockets with 10% of what’s left and the rest going in her piggy bank.

One of the features of the game is that you will, on a few occasions, be outside of the vehicle and you will have to out run police officers, mobsters and dodge certain other objects which will kill you in a second. As the game was built using Frostbite 2, the same engine used for Battlefield 3, I thought we would have some control over the character. I never thought for a second that it would become an open world environment and you had to escape by stealing a car Saints Row Bo-Duke style but I thought at least you would have some sort of control over the character and the environment to escape down a linear path. Open world, or at least semi-open would have made this even better if, for example, Sam gives you a location to a new car and now you’re given control of running and avoiding the angry mob chasing you down the streets and back alleys. Sadly the only control you have is by button mashing. It turns out that every time you are forced from your vehicle you are shoved into a quick time event that offers fuck all to the game. That’s what I get for assuming we’d get something unquie. So, yeah, that sucked.

The race, as I mentioned, is a 3000 mile race from San Francisco to New York, which to me meant many hours of driving across a beautifully Frostbite 2 rendered America but EA and Black Box said “nah.” An uninterrupted journey in real life, according to Google Maps, will take 47 hours and while I knew there was no chance of that in the game, I expected somewhere between the region of one sixth of that. My time for completion was two hours, seventeen minutes and thirty one seconds.

If you played Burnout Paradise then you will remember several of the races started in one corner of the map and then you had to race to the opposite corner of the map with the freedom to take whatever route you wanted. That’s how I had envisioned NFS: The Run to some degree. I expected that you would be given a start and a finish for each race over a large area and then it was up to you to finish first, in your own way, to move up the list of 200 drivers. Instead you are stuck in a group of short linear races with the odd challenge in between. You’re on the run from a criminal organisation so I don’t think this is exactly the time to be following diversion signs. You have the opportunity to win $25 million but see that road down there, I’m sorry to tell you but you can’t go down there. I know, I know, it will probably end up meaning you escape death and complete this race much quicker but don’t you worry, we’ll give you a linear challenge right after this race to make up the time you are behind your opponents because we let them take that road just there.

NFS: The Run feels like it could have done with a lot more planning. Instead of putting a lot of focus into the game, the way it plays and how far they are able push the boundaries with the amount of content, they restricted themselves to the limits of a short script. The problem is that the story doesn’t expand beyond the first twenty minutes of the game. There are no twists that come in along the way; you are given information regarding your characters past, what must be done to fix it and then it is just a case of winning. They could have easily dragged out portions of it to give us more gameplay or just kept expanding upon the dialogue and story as they saw fit but they stuck to a short linear storyline. This is the largest NFS game ever created, it has over 186 miles of track to drive on but why not go wild and throw in some more, there are another 2814 miles to play with. They didn’t have to make it completely open world like Burnout Paradise or like the incredibly huge Fuel (it takes longer to drive from one side of the map to the other in Fuel than it does to complete this game) but at least make the races longer and make it feel like you are actually fighting over a 3000 mile distance. Building a semi-open world and giving the user the choice of more routes to take and allowing them to take risks would have made this game more exciting. If you fail to win a race then you simply restart but why not put more pressure on the gamer by forcing them to then have to beat more people in the next race and make the game more challenging. Never at any point do you feel like you have to put in extra effort, just overtake your opponent and you will glide over that finish line with ease.

The AI is extremely boring and simple, they are easy to pass and stay ahead of. Black Box increase the difficulty by throwing in the police and the mob who attack you during your races. The police set up road blocks and try ram you off the road while the mob will ram you, shoot you and also send a helicopter with a machine gun out for you also. Sadly due to the fact that the races are short and sweet then it is easy to fend them off and win by a good five second or more margin per race. The police remind me of the defenders in Fifa. Even if your player is ten times faster and has ten times the stamina of the defender, he always catches you and the police in NFS: The Run are the exact same. Your high performance supercharged super duper supercar is doing over 200MPH but they will still continually catch up to you and remain on your bumper, even while you burn down a full nitrous meter, and attempt to run you into a road block which is set up ahead. The AI appears to have diplomatic immunity I might add; must get one of those bumper stickers.

NFS: The Run isn’t a bad game; I did enjoy what I played but I would think that anyone who purchases this game will feel cheated that this is all you are given. The graphics are stunning and the cars feel fast. Handling can be tough at times as the game engine compares the type of car you are driving and the type of road you are on at the time so you must adjust to the weather and environment. Once you pick a car you are stuck with it until you find a petrol station to pull into and change over to something which fits the road you’re driving on and these stations are rare and easy to miss. During the car selection process you will be given information regarding the cars handling so it will help in your decision. The challenge series looks like it would add another hour or two to the game but by the time you finish the main story the last thing you want to play are those challenges over and over again. There may be a selection of new challenges but I didn’t fully investigate as I rented this game hoping for it to be so much different than it turned out to be and I was finished with it once I completed the last race. As I rented I wasn’t given an online pass and I sure as hell wasn’t purchasing one. Multiplayer is multiplayer, you race against people in different playlists (playlists are just different types of divisions for cars such as muscle, sports etc), finish, repeat and imagine what twisted ways you would kill that twelve year old American kid who calls you a pussy and questions your granny style driving skills over the mic.

I think Criterion Games will and should be given full control of the NFS license. What I played of NFS: Hot Pursuit was great and the Burnout series is one of the most fun and enjoyable racing experiences you will find on any gaming system – I suppose that does come to the fact your aim is to take other people out so it doesn’t qualify as much as I would like it to.

Very short, finished far too quickly and just not satisfying in any shape or form, the Bucky Larson edition of Need For Speed: The Run.

Rating – 6