Need for Speed: The Run

Need For Speed: The Run is a fun, fast-paced, arcade racer with a great presentation. It's not the best arcade racer ever made, but between the engaging single player and long lasting social features, it could definitely scratch that itch for fans that are looking to trade some paint and get to the finish line first, above all else.

Need for Speed: The Run has a good racer inside it. It can be exciting and visceral, and there were numerous times in the game where I stopped and said, “Sh--, that was cool.” But all this awesome racing action gets somewhat lost amid the nonexistent story, the dumb/scripted AI, the lack of options, and the overall shortness of the game. The Run is not a marathon racing game, it's a quick and dirty drag race.

Need For Speed: The Run is a brilliant idea, but the game's bogged down by some iffy technical issues and frustrating AI. There's a lot to like about The Run — it's well presented and technically impressive — but its quirks will prevent you from returning despite its excellent Autolog implementation and decent track design.

With the campaign over in an afternoon and the rest of the package failing to offer anything to keep you playing, The Run is some decent throwaway fun that will be forgotten very quickly.

It’s something of a shame that The run ended up as the halfway house between Criterion’s efforts and the madcap racers that Black Box usually produce then, as the result is a curiously half-baked and tentative step forward for a developer that needed to find its feet after the technical issues and wayward pacing that plagued Undercover. What’s here is entertaining enough, but you can’t shake the feeling that the end product could have been so much more fulfilling with just a little mo...

Fusing a racing game with a Hollywood blockbuster-grade story is always going to be a hard sell. When have you ever known it to be pulled off in a really convincing and memorable way? Never. And if it has, then it can't have been particularly good, because we can't remember ever playing a racer that's successfully been married to a genuinely compelling story. On paper, Need for Speed: The Run's yarn sounds like a pitch for a movie, as it's high concept at its finest. The premise is simple: ge...