‘Need for Speed: The Run’ fun despite bumps in road

"Need for Speed: The Run" is a good (not great) game that hints at one potential future for racing games: driving across the entirety of America.

In the solo campaign of "The Run," you drive cars from San Francisco to Las Vegas, Denver, Detroit and New York, with plenty of stops in between.

Let's be clear. "The Run" doesn't have 3,000 miles of coast-to-coast tracks. Point A (San Francisco) to point Z (New York) is condensed into 186 miles of roads. That's pretty good.

But I can't help but think this is a taste of things to come. Eventually a game maker should be able to feed existing GPS and topographical stats into a game and translate all of America's roads and obstacles into a full-nation racer.

For now, however, we have "The Run." The handling of its driving is perfection across the Golden Gate Bridge, Las Vegas Boulevard, curvy mountains, busy highways and desert dirt roads.

Your often-exhilarating mission is to zoom along at more than 200 mph, zipping around ordinary cars, while methodically catching up to hundreds of rival racers far in front of you. You have until New York to catch them all.

Levels are broken into three modes: racing in a field of eight; racing for a while against a timer; and racing against just one rival car.

Large sections are easy enough when highways are wide with little traffic.

However, things become extremely difficult as quickly as Yosemite National Park, Calif., when you run into the back ends of RVs and the front ends of oncoming 18-wheelers. It's too easy to veer off a road, penalizing you.

Here's the regrettable yuck: As beautiful and smooth as this game mostly is, it is riddled with occasional challenges that completely and totally suck.

Specifically, the game will put you on a very curvy and wet road with hairpin turns. Then the game thrusts a rival car very far in front of you, and you must slip-slide-and-brake around ridiculous hairpin curves to try to catch up to him on a short timer.

Those sections are not just hard (hard alone would be OK). They are severely unfun. I have run perfect races on these wet hairpins, without crashing, and using all my turbo, and still lost those sections, over and over, for an hour.

Fortunately, that nonsense is redeemed by the online-multiplayer modes. They're fun despite their own nonfatal flaws:

Long load times; sporadic lagging; and if you begin an online race with bad pole position, or against a rabid gamer who unlocked a quicker car, you're out of luck, slowpoke.

Also, the game's storyline and sound are so negligible, I play "The Run" on mute while listening to my own music.

So it's a testament to the strengths of "The Run" (car handling, pretty vistas, great tracks) that it overcomes its hairy pits in the road -- just enough to recommend it to serious race car fans.

("Need for Speed: The Run" by EA retails for $60 for Xbox 360 and PS 3; $50 for Wii and PC; $40 for 3DS -- Plays mostly fun but sometimes frustrating. Looks very good. Challenging. Rated "T" for mild suggestive themes and violence. Three out of four stars.)

Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.