14 DAY TRIAL // Need for Speed: The Run, the new racing game from Black Box and Electronic Arts, has a special Challenge Series that delivers a more racing-focused experience than the regular single-player campaign.
The Run is getting ready to be released next month and has gotten quite a lot of people interested, especially since it uses the Frostbite 2 engine from Battlefield 2 and marks a return to story-based experiences, just like in older titles like NFS: Most Wanted.
Now, Kotaku reports that a Challenge Series mode is also available in NFS: The Run, which focuses purely on races, without any sort of story or narrative tying together the individual levels.
Basically, the Challenge Series uses the same tracks and environments from the regular single-player mode, and offers different types of challenges inspired by older NFS games. As such, there will be Most Wanted-style encounters with cops, Carbon-style nighttime races in canyons, or Underground-style races against tuned and customized cars.
Elements from last year's NFS: Hot Pursuit are also making a comeback, as players can perform Takedowns to eliminate rivals or cops, so vehicle damage remains an integral feature.
There are 70 challenges in total, broken up in 10 stages, with full support for the Autolog online system, charting the performance of players and sharing it with friends. Racers need to finish in first place and post times worthy of in-game medals, just like in Hot Pursuit.
What's really interesting is that such challenge races will have multiple timed sections, like the single-player story, so if you fail one, you're only forced to retry that certain section, not the whole race, thus preventing lots of frustration on behalf of players.
Last but not least, the website also points out that traffic is dynamically generated, so retrying time and time again until you memorize the behavior of all the other cars is no longer a viable tactic.
Expect more details about this Challenge Series in NFS: The Run soon.