Need for Speed: The Run reviewing on PlayStation3 by James Hamer-Morton. The game was supplied for review by Electronic Arts

It's a great concept; a cinematic race across the States against 200 other drivers. One long course, and no repetitive lap based segments. A variety of locales from the various cities on the route to snowy Colorado mountains and dusty Nevada deserts.

Your mission is instigated by a debt owed to less favourable types, an attractive female offering to spot you the 250k entry fee, and a promise to sort out your other financial worries for the bulk of a 25 million dollar prize. Needless to say, keeping the game cinematic means that the races are perforated by occassional set piece action sequences including the obligatory quick time events for when you emerge outside your vehicle, and some fast reactionary driving moments.

Races themselves are varied enough too, with your bog standard 'come first out of the 10 drivers in this leg' over a set period of time heading the list. There are some time trial checkpoint races, where you are merely trying to catch up time, and some more forgiving battle races that task you with staying in front of each progressive opponent as the time runs out for each one. The cross country trek is split into ten stages, each with around five events, and while that adds up to a lot of variety in courses and environments, EA have given us a new feature to the series that negates the problems of split second reaction and not knowing each track.

Reset tokens, of which your stash for each event will differ depending on your difficulty, allow you to either voluntarily go back to the last checkpoint to perform better, or have an alternative to game over if you wreck your car, or drift too far off the track. A welcome feature, it gives even the most inexperienced racer a good chance, and until the final event, I didn't run into one problem beating each event, and that was only because of the cinematic style finale, which mirrors the style of the introductary segment.

Reminiscent of Motorstorm Apocalypse, these moments give a real sense of action and purpose beyond simply overtaking your opponents, whether you avoid an oncoming train in the nick of time, or swerve to avoid avalanches. Even the more vanilla of the races sometimes have subtle twists, such as police chasing you, setting up roadblocks, or even 'the mob' trying to destroy your vehicle with gunfire, encouraging you to swerve around the road to avoid being hit. Indeed, should the worst happen, or you manage to take down an aggressive police car, the dramatic slow motion spark fest does instill a sense of awe.

Sometimes you will have a specific rival to beat, introduced by a picture and a text description of them on the loading screen. While generally more aggressive and worthy opponents, little is done to flesh out the characters or differentiate them from other races, besides being built up as mini boss battles. A missed opportunity perhaps, to expand the story. While the plot kind of goes out of the window when at the start of many events you are told to gain a set number of places, only for a spread of enemies to overtake you in the intro cinematic. Where did they all come from? Had you already overtaken them? Still, it's a petty grievance; merely one that made me question the validity of the overall goal, and my position in the rankings at each point.

While the majority of events require you to simply get to the end in front of the opponents, your actual time for the whole campaign is recorded and updated. Repeating stages later for better times is the best way to improve your scores, knowing the courses better and having unlocked more cars and abilities by simply playing the game in any mode. You'll gain XP by overtaking opponents (gaining more for a 'clean' pass, without smashing in to them), drifting, jumping, smashing or avoiding roadblocks and even simply surviving certain tretcherous sections. Get enough XP and you'll level up, gaining new abilities (even major enhancements to what you can do in the game, from drafting to boosting) and more cosmetic unlocks.

Network connectivity works really well to inspire competition between your friends. I was lucky enough to have a friend who had played through the game before me, and had their comparative times present themselves to me throughout the game. Even mid race you can see how far ahead or behind them you are for each stage. My final time for the entire run ended up at just over 2 hours and 16 minutes. While that doesn't sound like a very long game for the campaign, this factors in just the time spent actually racing, and certainly ignored the 50 odd rewinds I required to gain this score on the easiest difficulty. Pump up that level however and you'll be exposed to some punishing challenges, with extreme mode being ludicrous; giving you just one rewind per stage.

Speaking of challenges, after finishing each stage for the first time, you unlock the Challenge Series for that stage; a tricky time trial or timed race to earn the classic bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals. These will require a lot of dedication and patience to aquire, and definitely benefit from having more vehicles at your disposal, through multiplayer or simply levelling up in other modes. It does seem very difficult to get higher than a silver medal with your initial load out, and trophy/achievement hunters will spend a long time grinding these times down.

The game's Multi-Player rounds off the package, retaining the levelling system, and doing a fine job of keeping the gimmmicks of the game consistent. You'll have a playlist of events to battle over, with your final position being a combination of all of your performances. Plentiful rewards litter each type, with a trio of mini objectives (out of twenty for each playlist) keeping you focussed on varied targets without overwhelming you. The netcode works very fluidly for the most part, and while I have felt foiled by lag on a couple of occassions, my overall experience was a very positive one. Constantly having new objectives to think about, and further playlists to unlock will certainly encourage racers to keep coming back to grind a little bit closer to that 30th level.

Overall, Need For Speed: The Run is a solid and unique package that racing fans will certainly get plenty out of. EA has refreshed the franchise with quite a different experience, that despite its roots in basic racing has enough to warrent a look, especially if you're fed up of retreading the same laps over and over again.