They can’t even change lanes without making a drunken dive for the median strip or the ditch. Most cars swerve and shimmy down the highway like overladen shopping carts. Worse, yet, it manages to make its high-performance dream cars seem less capable than my mother’s minivan. These are all typical problems in racing videogames, but The Run‘s premise of a cross-country endurance race does not lend itself to short-track, short-attention-span racing. Instead of the open road, it offers an assortment of short, five-minute races timed events where you have to reach checkpoints to keep moving forward and “rubber-banding,” that cheat for computer-controlled drivers that ensures the AI is always nearby no matter how well you drive. Yet with 3,000 miles of highway at its disposal, and a fleet of the greatest cars the modern auto industry can offer, Need for Speed: The Run falls back on conventions of the racing genre that wore out their welcome 15 years ago. Along the way, you’ll battle police, bad weather, and even Mafia hit men. The duels continue over deadly mountain roads, desert tracks, 12-lane superhighways, and the streets of Chicago.
The big idea spans a continent: a street race from San Francisco to New York, featuring more than 200 drivers and the best cars in the world.