Review: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil anything here – I’ll steer clear of anything story-related beyond the premise. With another game, that would be tricky. With Skyrim, the stories that come from how the game works are often the best ones.

It’s a frozen nation, just to the north of where the previous game, Oblivion, took place. A pleasantly brief introduction sets up the plot: Skyrim is in the middle of a revolt, you’ve been sentenced to death, and dragons have just shown up. Good luck!

At that point, you emerge from a cave into 40 square kilometres of cold and mountainous country, and that’s it. Everything else is up to you.

Even after spending hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, the sense of freedom in Skyrim is dizzying. The vast mountains in every direction make the landscape seem limitless, and even after exploring it for 55 hours, this world feels huge and unknown on a scale neither of the previous two games did.

Not all of the landscape is subzero, and even among the frosty climes there’s an exciting variety: ice caverns that tinkle with dripping frost crystals, hulking mountains with curls of snow whipped up by the howling wind, coniferous forests in rocky river valleys.

The mountains change everything. Wherever you decide to head, your journey is split between scrambling up treacherous rocks and skidding down heart-stopping slopes. The landscape is a challenge, and travel becomes a game.

It’s hard to walk for a minute in any direction without encountering an intriguing cave, a lonely shack, some strange stones, a wandering traveller, a haunted fort. These were sparse and quickly repetitive in Oblivion, but they’re neither in Skyrim: it’s teeming with fascinating places, all distinct. It was 40 hours before I blundered into a dungeon that looked like one I’d seen before, and even then what I was doing there was drastically different.

These places are the meat of Skyrim, and they’re what makes it feel exciting to explore. You creep through them with your heart in your mouth, your only soundtrack the dull groan of the wind outside, to discover old legends, dead heroes, weird artefacts, dark gods, forgotten depths, underground waterfalls, lost ships, hideous insects and vicious traps. It’s the best Indiana Jones game ever made.

The dragons don’t show up until you do the first few steps of the game’s main quest, so it’s up to you whether you want them terrorising the world as you wander around. A world where you can crest a mountain to find a 40-foot flying lizard spitting jets of ice at the village below is a much more interesting one to be in. But fighting them never changes much: you can just ignore them until they land, then shoot them from a distance when they do.

Your first dragon kill is a profound, weird moment. I rushed to the crashed carcass to loot it, then looked up. The whole town had come out to stand around and stare at the body, a thing as vast and alien to them as a T-rex in a museum.

I tried shooting an ice bolt at it, just to demonstrate it was dead, and the force unexpectedly catapulted the whole thing violently into the distance. A beggar looked at me and said, “Oh sure, just throw your trash around.”

Your character gets better at whatever you do: firing a bow, sneaking up on people, casting healing spells, mixing potions, swinging an axe. There’s always been an element of this practice-based system in Elder Scrolls games, but in Skyrim it’s unrestricted – you don’t have to decide what you’re going to focus on when you create your character, you can just let it develop organically.

That alone would feel a little too hands-off, but you also level up. When that happens, you get a perk point: something you can spend on a powerful improvement to a skill you particularly like. Every hour, you’re making a major decision about your character’s abilities.

They’re dramatic. The first point you put into Destruction magic lets you stream jets of flame from your hands for twice as long as before. As you continue to invest in one skill, you can get more interesting tweaks: I now have an Archery perk that slows down time when I aim my bow, and one for the Sneak skill that lets me do a stealthy forward roll.

Again, the freedom is dizzying: every one of 18 skills has a tree of around 15 perks, and the range of heroes you could build is vast. I focused on Sneak to the point of absurdity – now I’m almost invisible, and I get a 3,000% damage bonus for backstabs with daggers. It’s the play style I’ve always wanted in an RPG, but I’ve never been able to achieve it before.

The enemies you encounter are, in some cases, generated by the game to match the level of your character. In Oblivion that sometimes felt like treading water: progress was just a stat increase, and your enemies kept pace. That doesn’t apply now that your character is defined more by his or her perks, because the way you play is always changing.

Levelled content is also just used less: at level 30, my most common enemies are still bandits with low-level weapons. And I still run into things too dangerous for me to tackle.

Taking a narrow mountain path to a quest, something stops me in my tracks: a dragon roar. I check the skies – nothing, but I hear it again three more times before the peak.

At the top I find a camp full of bodies, with a large black bear roaring over them. Hah. He’s still more than I can handle in straight combat, but as he reaches me I use a Dragon Shout. It befriends any animal instantly, and he saunters casually away. Feeling slightly guilty, I stab him in the back before it wears off.

Which is when the dragon lands, with an almighty crash, six feet from my face.

I run.

A roar of frozen air catches me in the back, but I keep going – over a ridge, down a short drop, and straight into a bandit. I dodge the bandit, straight into a Flame Atronarch. There are five more bandits behind it. The dragon is airborne. I throw myself off the mountain, several hundred metres into the river below.

I plummet to the riverbed, and swim until I run out of breath. When I surface, the sky is alight with fireballs and flaming arrows, the dragon is spewing a stream of ice down on the bandits, and I’m laughing.

The stealthy character I built in Skyrim would have been less fun in Oblivion. Whether you were detected was a binary and erratic matter. Skyrim cleverly gives you an on-screen indication of how suspicious your enemies are, and where they are as they hunt for you. It makes stealth viable even against large groups: if you’re rumbled, you can retreat and hide. And there’s a slow, methodical pace to it – long minutes of tension broken by sudden rushes of gratification or panic.

Magic, meanwhile, has been given an incredible crackle of raw power. Emperor Palpatine would be a level one mage in Skyrim – unleashing two torrents of thrashing electrical arcs is literally the first trick you learn, and it doesn’t even get you tossed into a reactor shaft.

One tweak is a huge loss, though: you can’t design your own spells. Oblivion’s spellmaking opened up so many clever possibilities – now you’re mostly restricted to what you can buy in shops.

While we’re on the negatives, physical combat hasn’t improved much. There are cinematic kill moves when your enemy is low on health, but whether they trigger seems to be either random or dependent on whether the pre-canned animation fits into the space you’re in. Too much of the time, you wave your weapon around and enemies barely react to the hits.

The exception is archery: bows are now deliciously powerful, and stealth shots can skewer people in one supremely satisfying thwunk.

What does improve the general combat is a feature I didn’t quite expect: you can hire or befriend permanent companions. I did a minor favour for an elf at the start of the game that earned me his loyalty for the next 40 hours of play. Sidekicks add a wild side to fights: an arrow from nowhere can end a climactic battle, or a misplaced Dragon Shout can accidentally knock your friend into an abyss.

The Dragon Shouts, gained by exploration and killing dragons, are like a manlier version of conventional magic. One can send even a Giant flying, one lets you breathe fire, another makes you completely invincible for a few seconds. Even the one for befriending furry animals is macho: it can turn four bears and a wolf pack into obedient pets with one angry roar.

Before I got the animal shout, I had a Sabre Tooth problem. Crossing a fast-flowing river at the top of a waterfall, a huge feral cat spotted me. A good shot with a bow made no dent on its vast health bar, and it splashed into the water to get to me. The current was too strong to get away in time, so I did the one thing it couldn’t: turned invincible and threw myself off the waterfall.

After seconds of freefall, I hit the rocks, got my bearings, and looked up. The cat – a speck above – seemed to be looking over the falls at me. Then it slipped. Its lanky ragdoll smacked every rocky outcropping on the way down, and wedged between two stones directly above me, his huge head glaring emptily.

The first few quests you’re nudged towards get you the Dragon Shouts. After that, the main quest is a bizarre mix of some of the best moments in the game, and some of the worst.

It fails where the previous games fail: it tries to make your mission feel epic by making it about a prophecy, then does all its exposition in the time-honoured format of old men giving you interminable lectures. The acting is stagey at best, painful at worst. And it adds a new problem: your dialogue choices are now written out in full, and your only options are to react like an incredulous schoolchild to every predictable development. It doesn’t make it easy to feel like a hero.

The main quests themselves are mostly good: a happy mix of secrecy, adventure, and exploring incredible new places. One location, which I won’t spoil, got an actual gasp. But then there’s an abysmal stealth mission that seems to work on a logic entirely its own: guards spot you from miles away, despite facing the wrong direction. And the boss dragons it keeps throwing at you never get any more interesting to fight – adding more hitpoints just makes the repetition even harder to ignore.

Everywhere else, the quests are magnificent. Chance encounters lead to sprawling epics that take you to breathtaking locations, uncover old secrets, and pull interesting twists. Even the faction quests are better here. It feels like Bethesda realised these became the main quest for many players, and built on that for Skyrim. They start small, but each one unravels into a larger story with higher stakes. Some of them feel like the personal epic that the main quest has always failed to be.

We got a review copy of Skyrim the day the game was officially finished, but it’s curiously buggy. Among a lot of minor problems such as issues reassigning controls, there’s glitchy character behaviour that can break quests, and AI flipouts that can turn a whole town against you. And the interface isn’t well adapted to PC: it sometimes ignores the position of your cursor in menus. There’s an update due as soon as the game’s out, but there’s a hell of a lot to patch here. Next time, maybe don’t commit to a specific release day just because it has a lot of elevens in it?

These aren’t engine issues, though. Skyrim is based on tech Bethesda built specially for it, rather than the middleware engine used by Oblivion and Fallout 3. It’s a lean, swift, beautiful thing. New lighting techniques and a fluffy sort of frozen fog give the world a cold sparkle, and the previously puffy faces are sharp, mean and defined. Even load times are excitingly quick. On maximum settings, it runs at 30-40 frames per second on a PC that runs Oblivion at 50-60 – a decent trade off for the increase in scenery porn.

There’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of everything, and you have totally free rein of it. Skyrim feels twice the size of Oblivion, despite being the same acreage, just because there’s so much more to see and do. Searching for Dragon Shouts is a game in itself. Exploring every dungeon is a game in itself. Each one of the six factions is a game in itself. So the fact that the main quest is a mixed bag doesn’t hurt Skyrim’s huge stock of amazing experiences.

The games we normally call open worlds – the locked off cities and level-restricted grinding grounds – don’t compare to this. While everyone else is faffing around with how to control and restrict the player, Bethesda just put a fucking country in a box. It’s the best open world game I’ve ever played, the most liberating RPG I’ve ever played, and one of my favourite places in this or any other world.

In case I’m not getting it across, this is a thumbs-up.

Review: Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Kill 'em All, Kill Every Last One!

Assassin's Creed: Revelations tears me up inside a bit. So many of my emotions were toyed with throughout my time with the game that, by the end, I honestly couldn't tell if I loved it or hated it. I admit that I love the Assassin's Creed series and have since before it was cool (I thoroughly enjoyed the first game in spite of its many flaws), and I confess that I'm more than happy with an annual release as long as a game is good. Brotherhood was a great example of this; it came out only a year after Assassin's Creed II and still managed to be very good on all fronts. So what happened with Revelations?

One of the greatest complaints about annual release schedules in the game industry is that it's almost impossible to make a game in such a short amount of time without suffering from stagnancy, glitches, or a lack of content. While Assassin's Creed: Revelations manages to give you more than your money's worth in content, it is a rather significant disappointment on the other two fronts. The game is a glitchy mess and the new content is not only useless, but sometimes an annoying distraction from the rest of the game. Ubisoft, we need to talk. I understand that tower defense is kind of a big deal right now, but you really shouldn't force that kind of gameplay mechanic to a game like Assassin's Creed; it really breaks up the experience.

That's the biggest change to the game this time around, a rather frustrating tower defense mini-game. Instead of Borgia towers, this time around you have to take down the Templar dens. The twist is that, even after you've taken out their leader and gained their territory, they can take it back. While you're gallivanting about Constantinople, killing Templars and flirting with locals, you may get a message telling you that one of your dens is contested. You then have to walk all the way across town to get to that den, where you command your own assassins to protect your den against the attacking Templars. You have a bunch of different assassin types that you can put on the rooftops around you and you can also put up defensive barriers with cannons and flamethrowers on the ground. It sounds good on the surface but in practice it's a mess. The controls are clunky, the camera is unwieldy, and it's persistently frustrating since the last wave is pretty damn close to impossible to protect against without a perfectly assembled team. It's not fun, and the complete disconnect from the rest of the gameplay is disconcerting, especially since I could easily walk down there and kill every last Templar myself with a better success rate.

The part that bothered me the most is that without fail it always seemed to be that the Templar den farthest away from me was the one that was contested, meaning it took forever to get there for fear of losing my territory. This was made worse by the fact that there were no horses to get you there so you had to run. Sure there are sewers to quick-teleport you around town this time around - same as in Brotherhood - but I had completely forgotten about them because they were never once mentioned in-game. While the tower defense segments were boring and frankly annoying, at least you can take some bit of solace in knowing that, if you lose, you can basically walk right back in and take back the territory. By the end of the game, I was doing all I could (bribing heralds) to keep the amount of tower defense interruptions to a minimum, or I'd let them win on purpose just so I could kill their leader and get back to the real game.

There are a few other additions to gameplay as well, but really nothing significant. This time around you get a hook blade, which allows you to slide down zip-lines and jump higher when climbing buildings. This was little more than aesthetic since I rarely used the zip-lines and most of the building-climbing action was practically identical to the previous iterations. The other addition is the ability to create and use bombs. You get three types of bomb: Offensive, tactical, and diversionary; they're all actually useful in their own right but almost impossible to use mid-fight, meaning that they never get used, so the various ingredients you get along the way pile up fast. This is disheartening because instead of large sums of money, the primary loot you get when finding treasure chests or looting enemies are bomb ingredients.

Other than that, the game is basically the same as II and Brotherhood. You're still climbing buildings and enjoying some pretty intense free-running; the combat is the same, save for some really gnarly kill animations that you get thanks to the hook-blade; and the property management is identical to Brotherhood rather than II. Basically it's more of the same, which can certainly be a problem if you're looking for innovation. Thing is, I don't mind more of the same as long as it's more of the same quality material, or if the story is good. Sadly, the game is full of persistent issues, so that ruins what could have been an enjoyable experience.

First and foremost, I found the controls to be broken, which is weird since I felt the controls were really good in the previous titles. Climbing buildings seems like a total crap-shoot most of the time, where you'll press the stick in the direction you need to go, and he won't move, or you'll try to jump up and instead jump away from the building, falling to your death. Combat was broken as well, since more enemies have guns this time around and when you need to take that guy with the rifle out before he headshots you, Ezio still insists on lunging towards the insignificant guys with the pocket knives. I never had these issues in previous games, so I know it's not my own fault. I died plenty of times at the hands of the poor controls, and that alone almost makes the game too frustrating to enjoy.

But that's not all! In addition to the poor controls and gameplay features, the game is also a technical mess. I can handle visual glitches, instances where textures refuse to load, animations go berserk, or character models disappear and reappear before your eyes (of which there are plenty), but the problem is when the game itself breaks and you have to reset or abort your current mission. There were over a half dozen times I had to restart my game because Ezio got stuck in a wall, or the tower defense game refused to continue due to one of the assassins being caught on a polygon, or falling through a pillar into the nether-world. I realize this game is classified as a sandbox, and I understand that when you have that much content to go through it's hard to make sure everything works flawlessly, but Brotherhood didn't have any of these issues and it had the same time constraints, so there's no excuse for this. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time forgiving a game that's so fundamentally broken that I can barely play it without fear of it breaking. Luckily I was unable to recreate any of the game-freezing bugs, so I don't think they're too persistent; I'm under the impression that I'm the unlucky minority.

But enough with the bad parts of the game, I hate being negative.

Like previous games in the series, Revelations packs a ton of content. In addition to the story, which on its own lasts 10-12 hours, there's literally hundreds of things to keep you busy, including treasures to find, property to acquire, data fragments to collect, and side missions to do - just like in previous games. I didn't even come close to getting all the content and I easily spent more than 30 hours with the game's single player campaign alone. There's also an updated multiplayer mode, which is still really unique and interesting, but I can't really see it having any sort of longevity. I played a few dozen matches and I really have no need or desire to ever play it again. It was a great experience, but I've got stuff to do. I am also not a fan of the fact that you need to sign up for an online pass to play the vs mode, but this is neither the time nor place to rant about online passes.

Though to be honest, I think the thing that I like most about Assassin's Creed is the story. Yeah, the combat is usually satisfying and free-running is better in this series than any other, but I keep returning to the series to see more about this deep and involving plot that has been woven across generations and eras. It's not the kind of story for everyone, in fact it's so religiously motivated that the game has to put a disclaimer at the beginning assuring people that it was created by a team of developers of varying religions and faiths, but I like it! While I'm not going to spoil the story for the previous games, I will tell you that this time around we're seeing a nice end to the stories of both Ezio and Altair. It's nice to see both of them in their later years, and how they reflect on their lives, since they were both such important figures to the assassins. It's also kind of mind-bending to see Desmond looking back into Ezio's life as Ezio is looking back to Altair's life to discover the secrets of the Apple of Eden. It's all really trippy, but it makes for a glorious epilogue to the stories of two legends in the world's canon.

But the problem is that they're just that: epilogues. We've already seen both protagonists during the important, interesting times of their lives, we spent entire games exploring those periods. We've seen Altair learn the truth about the Creed, and the nature of the Apple. We've seen Ezio rise to the challenge of his family and unite the Brotherhood. Now all we have to do is watch as they live out the winters of their lives; hell, even the NPC's have to remind you how old you are from time to time. While the story was wonderfully told and surprisingly touching, there's no denying that the plot could have been handled just fine without having to inflate the game to be 30 hours long through the use of side quests. The parts of the game where you take control of Altair were remarkably linear, and I truly think the whole game would have been better that way, since it was such a simple and concise plot to work through.

In addition to witnessing the ends of the lives of Ezio and Altair, you're also fighting to de-fragment Desmond's mind, which cropped up after the events at the end of Brotherhood. Basically, Desmond is in a coma, only kept alive in the animus, where he has to not only unlock the secrets of Ezio and Altair, but also fix himself by finding those pieces of fragmented data that I mentioned earlier. The more of them you collect, the more of Desmond's past can be unlocked. Few games are able to tell a story very well, hell, most games are content to tell you the princess is in another castle, but the Assassin's Creed series offers the kind of depth that reminds you that games can tell stories too, and sometimes they're really, REALLY good. You just have to pay attention, there's a lot to go through.

Doubly so since the game's production values (save the glitches) are top notch. The world that Ubisoft has concocted is easily one of the most beautiful, living worlds I've seen in a game, bar none. I think the one thing that impressed me most was when I was running past a graveyard, and I saw a couple hugging each other, crying into each other over the loss of their son. It wasn't part of the mission I was doing, I didn't even have to go through that graveyard to get to my destination, yet I saw a surprisingly human experience in this digital world and that image has stuck with me to the end of my time with Ezio. I'm also remarkably impressed with the character and costume design! I know game award shows don't give prizes in the category of “best dressed”, but if they did, the Assassin's Creed series would win every year. No other game comes close to the fidelity and authenticity of the costume design here.

I also think that the audio in this series has remained top notch. The score is really well done and authentic sounding, and the voice acting is pretty damn good, too. Every nick, grunt, or shing of a blade going through a Templar's chest really gives the game an audible kick, and few games are able to do it this well. I'd go into more depth about it, but you try describing the Star Wars theme, it's better heard than described, trust me.

Regardless of the plot and production values, I have a hard time recommending Assassin's Creed: Revelations. I want to, because I'm a massive fan of the series, but the persistent glitches and annoying tower defense minigame really ruined my ability to enjoy it. Wait until it's on sale, by then they should have a patch to fix it and you'll be getting it cheap, so it's a win for everyone.

Review: Need for Speed: The Run

Great for those who need naps between each race.

There once was a proud franchise called Need for Speed. They were car games that glorified the street racer, pampered the inner tuner in all of us, and allowed for aesthetic car modifications outrageous enough to make Liberace blush. Now it seems to be a brand without an identity. Hot Pursuit was a great entry from a studio that has proven itself on the Burnout franchise. The Shift part of the franchise tries to take a less arcade-style approach to the series, falling flat in its second outing. Now comes Need for Speed: The Run, an attempt to infuse story into a racing game. This isn't the first time the marriage of the story and racing has been attempted in Need for Speed, and this one just miserably as the previous attempts did, if not more so.

Need for Speed: The Run tells the story of Jack, a guy who's gotten himself into debt with the mob. How shall he cure his ills? He'll be convinced by his hot friend Sam (a girl) to enter in a dangerous race from San Francisco to New York City. If he wins, he'll be out of debt with the mob and walk away with a mighty chunk of change as well. The setup sounds logical enough, though a 250 car race from one end of the country to the other is about as ridiculous as any Michael Bay movie plot. An attempt to infuse a story into a racing game isn't in itself a bad idea, just look at the very profitable (if critically panned) Fast & Furious movies. However, if you're going to put a story in there, you should spend some decent time on character designs and animation, and perhaps even invest in a script writer to give you a story and dialog that makes sense. Just because a studio knows how to build a digital racetrack doesn't mean it can tell a story. What story is present is told through cutscenes with ample quick time events (QTE), and we all just love QTEs. They are as annoying as ever, creating a trial-and-error system just to progress through poor cutscenes and get to the next race.

Once you're in the race, the game is actually pretty good, if shallow. The racing mechanics are tight and show wide variety between muscle cars, exotics, and technical vehicles. However, they are a bit oversimplified. When Need for Speed: The Run tells me a MacLaren MP4-12C is harder to handle than a Lamborghini Gallardo, I have to wonder what drunken lobotomized monkey was in charge of researching vehicle handling. Need for Speed isn't a racing simulator, but if you're going to use licensed vehicles, they should at least be semi-accurate representations of those vehicles. Those oversimplifications aside, the driving is well handled, hearkening back to Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit with it boost tactics. The use of the handbrake for tight turns is also here, a must for an arcade racer with technical courses, which The Run has in spades.

The tracks in Need for Speed: The Run are some of its strongest points. The game faithfully recreates the look and feel of America as you sojourn from coast to coast at high speed. While not recreating actual roadways, it captures the feel of those roadways while creating tracks that challenge drivers from start to finish. The Run is the actual story section and is divided into ten stages. Each stage has a handful of events. Some of these are straight-up races in which you must come in first or "gain X places." Others require you to overtake only a few drivers, but one-on-one before the time runs out to overtake and hold the lead on each car. There are also events called "Make Up Time" in which you have to simply reach the end of the course before the timer runs out. Throughout the game, the police will try to end your run for glory and gold, but they annoyingly focus on you and virtually ignore your competition. At the very beginning, and towards the very end, you'll also be dealing with police and the mob shooting at you from their cars or helicopters, which proves to be more annoying than challenging.

Need for Speed: The Run relies heavily on "Resets." Depending on your difficulty level, you get a fixed number of resets for any event. Crash, run too far off course (which varies widely from event to event), or fail to overtake a timed opponent, and you'll use a reset. If all your resets are gone and you mess up, you'll fail the event. While this sounds like a decent idea, it shows off one of the biggest problems with The Run: load times. A simple reset takes 10-15 seconds. Want to restart the event? You're looking at 30 seconds of loading at a bare minimum. Considering this is a racing game, event restarts are the norm, so this gets really old, really fast. The load times get even longer when you first start up an event and are absolutely abysmal when you're waiting to get into an online race. What's absolutely infuriating is when you get reset near the beginning of an event. You'll have to wait through the reset load, then you may as well restart the event since resets take away experience points at the end, so you may as well catch some shut-eye waiting to get back into the action. This is Need for Speed, not Need for Napping.

Perhaps these vast load times are caused by Black Box's implementation of the Frostbite 2 engine. This is only the second game to use it and it does look brilliant. Particle and weather effects, collisions, physics, and everything else Frostbite 2 brings to the table are a great improvement to the series. It is the best looking Need for Speed game yet. However, most racers would rather have a game that doesn't look quite so brilliant and loads up races faster. The sound design is also well executed, particularly the soundtrack. It sounds like an AAA action movie from start to finish and the car sounds are guttural and great. Unfortunately, there's the horrendous story pulling down the presentation score. It's obvious Black Box focused the vast majority of their attention on what the game was like while you were in the car, making all the time spent out of the car feel tedious and cliched.

There is more to Need for Speed: The Run than the story mode. There are challenge modes unlocked by progressing through The Run. Each of these is a playlist of events in different parts of the country. They are of the same nature as the events in The Run though. Earning medals in these events unlocks better cars to use in The Run. The online play is more enjoyable than any other part of the game, though it's very shallow. There are ten playlists of races that have to be unlocked by completing challenges in multiplayer. They are each focused on a specific type of car or course, but all are just plain online races. Need for Speed: The Run is terribly shallow online compared to Hot Pursuit, which offered several online modes to choose from. Once again, there is no splitscreen in this Need for Speed game. The Run itself has arguable reply value, but if you want to retry an earlier event in The Run (like in that sweet new car you unlocked in a challenge), you can't just retry one event, but have to redo the entire stage that event was in. All these modes and events earn you experience points, though all the driver abilities are unlocked very early on and subsequent levels only earn you driver profile images and icons rather than cars, making the leveling underwhelming.

Need for Speed: The Run had a chance to do what no Need for Speed game has successfully done: align a good story with a quality racing game. At the finish line, it failed to do either. The story is equal parts ridiculous and boring. The racing game is good technically, but shallow in content and horribly paced due to ungodly loading times. Keep playing Hot Pursuit or Shift, give this one a pass, and pray that Electronic Arts doesn't keep driving the Need for Speed franchise into the ground with mediocre titles like this.