Need for Speed: The Run

Need for Speed: The Run was released by EA Black Box in 2011 as an attempt to return the series to a stronger story and a more cinematic take on racing, after previous instalments had relied more on free roaming in an open city without a significant plot. The player takes the role of a driver who, because of debts, is forced into an illegal cross-country race across the United States from San Francisco to New York, evading both enforcers and the police while fighting through thousands of rivals towards the finish.

In terms of play it is arcade racing built on the Frostbite engine, which brought the series a visually richer environment and more varied routes leading through cities, mountains, deserts and snowy passes, making the route across America a prominent part of the experience. Between the stages of the journey the player can choose from several licensed cars and adapt the route depending on whether they prefer faster but riskier shortcuts. Need for Speed: The Run combines classic racing with short cinematic quick-time event sequences in which the player flees on foot or deals with dramatic situations outside the car, which was meant to give the game a blockbuster pace similar to action films of the day. The Autolog system, which tracked friends' results and motivated players to beat them through leaderboards and challenges, was by this time already a standard part of the Need for Speed series.

Reception of the game was mixed. Players praised the visuals, the variety of routes and the dynamic weather, but the emphasis on story and the rather short campaign drew criticism for being superficial, with underdeveloped characters. Even so, The Run stays in fans' memories as an interesting, if not unreservedly successful, attempt to take classic arcade racing and wrap it in the form of a gripping road movie set across an entire continent, with plenty of spectacular crashes and police chases.