Someone with more sense would have probably started with Most Wanted or Unbound, but the premise here, an expert driver on the run from the mob entering a cross-country race, had too much of a magnetic pull on me to try any other NFS title. For my many problems with the game, it succeeds on a very basic and immediate level: The Run looks and sounds fantastic, a sense of speed so profound that I’d emote to an embarrassing degree while playing, yelping at every head-on collision and holding my breath until I managed to clear the finish line. Its bigger ideas are sadly where it stumbles, the obvious cinematic ambitions of its story and gestures towards the arcade framing of the race feeling half-finished and compromised- there’s an amazing game you can squint and occasionally see for brief glimpses at a time, but it’s a rare thing.
Ultimately its main issue is the rigidity of the whole campaign, setpieces and scripting that are so predetermined, that in this illegal underground race, trying to cut through a median is enough a faux paus that the game will cut to black and reset your position on the road- and fully embodied with a final race that's so devoted to spectacle, that your position doesn't matter until the last 10 seconds of the race. It’s all the usual problems with 7th gen blockbusters, rules and expectations changing scene-to-scene, and even met on its own terms, this hyper-linear, directed experience can’t always maintain a consistent pace for its bombast.
I had originally started playing this a couple of years ago having just come off playing the Ace Combat games for the first time, and going from those titles, where radio chatter is near-constant and helps to add some gravitas to even the most mundane missions, to this, where stretches of the game are spent commuting between one set piece to the next in near-total silence, was a deeply deflating realization. There’s a pervasive sense that it was a budgetary issue more than anything else: I doubt the rival races, where you face off against a named character and get a brief synopsis of them, were meant to play out without any chatter- hard not imagine the game playing out more smoothly if there was more reactions throughout, more drama to the races. (Might’ve also helped to distract from the fact the back half of the game has you going backwards through old courses as well.)
This mechanical starkness isn’t wholly a terrible thing though- if you’re a fiend, the harder difficulties do offer some new perspectives on the underlying systems. The time trials seemed impossibly difficult at first, demanding that you corner near-perfectly while also driving dangerously enough to generate enough NoS meter to keep your speed up, and doing all this to still only clear checkpoints with milliseconds to spare. Other events, like the standard races also massively benefit from some of of these changes, other racers now able to take shortcuts and boost on their own, so you're further encouraged to drive aggressively and knock them into hazards where possible.
There’s amazing tension when it comes together, especially when cops and mobsters are added in, all contributing to a game where it can feel like you're on the razor's edge for stages at a time, but the margins for error are so tight that it really bring into focus some of the random elements, like the traffic and the other racers behavior- sometimes getting good patterns that let you consistently weave between cars to build meter, other times so catastrophically unlucky that both lanes of a two-lane road are occupied at once, and so you end up swerving away as your competitors speed off into the distance. I’m far more inclined towards the liveliness brought by these deviations than if the game had fixed traffic patterns, but it’s one of the reasons I think the game plays best if you alternate between Extreme and Very Hard.
While more time with the game got me to appreciate some of the particulars of its systems, it also helped me realize that the actual core of the game is totally inverted from its initial appeal- this cinematic coast-to-coast race revealing itself as a series of segmented challenges, with a surprising lack of narrative framing throughout. Still a killer premise, and the flashes of the arcade design, like the constant reminders of your IGT and number of resets that you’ve used, or the fact there seem to be some legitimate routing opportunities given that you can only switch out vehicles at certain designated points, feel like they speak to the potential that’s just under the surface. Admittedly, you’d be crazy to devote yourself to this in the here and now, with its unskippable cutscenes and long load times, but the beating heart of it is always there.
I can’t muster the energy to say that it’s some forgotten gem and a rage on about the amnesiac nature of the industry and games preservation, but it might be something to give a chance when trying out other delisted titles like Outrun 2 or Driver: San Francisco. For all its flaws, I’ve always enjoyed my time playing and writing about The Run- catastrophe and excellence in equal measure.
Ultimately its main issue is the rigidity of the whole campaign, setpieces and scripting that are so predetermined, that in this illegal underground race, trying to cut through a median is enough a faux paus that the game will cut to black and reset your position on the road- and fully embodied with a final race that's so devoted to spectacle, that your position doesn't matter until the last 10 seconds of the race. It’s all the usual problems with 7th gen blockbusters, rules and expectations changing scene-to-scene, and even met on its own terms, this hyper-linear, directed experience can’t always maintain a consistent pace for its bombast.
I had originally started playing this a couple of years ago having just come off playing the Ace Combat games for the first time, and going from those titles, where radio chatter is near-constant and helps to add some gravitas to even the most mundane missions, to this, where stretches of the game are spent commuting between one set piece to the next in near-total silence, was a deeply deflating realization. There’s a pervasive sense that it was a budgetary issue more than anything else: I doubt the rival races, where you face off against a named character and get a brief synopsis of them, were meant to play out without any chatter- hard not imagine the game playing out more smoothly if there was more reactions throughout, more drama to the races. (Might’ve also helped to distract from the fact the back half of the game has you going backwards through old courses as well.)
This mechanical starkness isn’t wholly a terrible thing though- if you’re a fiend, the harder difficulties do offer some new perspectives on the underlying systems. The time trials seemed impossibly difficult at first, demanding that you corner near-perfectly while also driving dangerously enough to generate enough NoS meter to keep your speed up, and doing all this to still only clear checkpoints with milliseconds to spare. Other events, like the standard races also massively benefit from some of of these changes, other racers now able to take shortcuts and boost on their own, so you're further encouraged to drive aggressively and knock them into hazards where possible.
There’s amazing tension when it comes together, especially when cops and mobsters are added in, all contributing to a game where it can feel like you're on the razor's edge for stages at a time, but the margins for error are so tight that it really bring into focus some of the random elements, like the traffic and the other racers behavior- sometimes getting good patterns that let you consistently weave between cars to build meter, other times so catastrophically unlucky that both lanes of a two-lane road are occupied at once, and so you end up swerving away as your competitors speed off into the distance. I’m far more inclined towards the liveliness brought by these deviations than if the game had fixed traffic patterns, but it’s one of the reasons I think the game plays best if you alternate between Extreme and Very Hard.
While more time with the game got me to appreciate some of the particulars of its systems, it also helped me realize that the actual core of the game is totally inverted from its initial appeal- this cinematic coast-to-coast race revealing itself as a series of segmented challenges, with a surprising lack of narrative framing throughout. Still a killer premise, and the flashes of the arcade design, like the constant reminders of your IGT and number of resets that you’ve used, or the fact there seem to be some legitimate routing opportunities given that you can only switch out vehicles at certain designated points, feel like they speak to the potential that’s just under the surface. Admittedly, you’d be crazy to devote yourself to this in the here and now, with its unskippable cutscenes and long load times, but the beating heart of it is always there.
I can’t muster the energy to say that it’s some forgotten gem and a rage on about the amnesiac nature of the industry and games preservation, but it might be something to give a chance when trying out other delisted titles like Outrun 2 or Driver: San Francisco. For all its flaws, I’ve always enjoyed my time playing and writing about The Run- catastrophe and excellence in equal measure.