I Can’t Look Away from “Need for Speed: The Run”

Dear Reader,

“Need for Speed: The Run” has got to be one of the worst ideas for a game in a while. Well behind “Gotham City Imposters,” mind you, but still ridiculous. The E3 demo was a snooze, and there was nary a person in the line to play it. But even if the game was a masterpiece, “The Run” is a fool’s errand from a business perspective. It’s off-point from the rest of the brand and disorienting, and the details about it just make it more confusing. A recent IGN article promised that the “on-foot” sections would only be 10 percent of the game. Most people’s reactions were, “What the hell? There’s an on-foot section?”

Still, like a terrible car wreck on the side of the road, I can’t stop looking at this weird little disaster. They’re building it on the Frostbite 2 engine, which strikes me as odd, since the game makes little use of destruction from what I could tell in my time with it. And what’s all this crap about “thrilling story”? Who is clamoring for a richer, deeper narrative in racing games? The deeper question is: what is EA thinking with pushing this game? Especially when they’ve already spawned two parallel off-shoots of the brand (“Hot Pursuit” and “Shift”).

I just don’t get it. Someone explain this to me.

–AA

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