Over the course of EA's upcoming racing game, you'll be tearing across the country in an underground competition for big ol' gobs of money. But, there's going be another single-player mode for Need for Speed The Run that parcels out the game's environments into bite-size chunks.
The Challenge Series changes things up a bit by requiring you to finish first and get a medal time. The races get broken up in timed sections but—if you don't make it all the way through one—you won't have to go all the way back to the beginning, depending on where you stall out.
There's 70 events in Challenge, broken up amongst 10 stages. They're all connected to Autolog, too, so you'll get the whole suite of social networking functionality-challenges, updates, etc.—that that feature brings. You'll unlock even more cars by competing this mode's levels. The Challenge Series also gets Theme Packs, which are races that call back to the styles of previous NFS games. So, Most Wanted focuses on car chases and throws tons of cop-mobiles at you during the action. The Carbon theme pack takes place at nighttime and offers a bit of the dangerous canyon racing NFS Carbon focused on. And, finally, the Underground pack centers on the tuner mechanics of customization and performance.
You'll see a bit of the continuing Burnout legacy in EA racing games with the Takedowns that happen in the video above, too. The traffic gets randomly generated in Challenege so it'll never be as easy as just memorizing where the gaps are. There may be a bit of hype surrounding all of the out-of-car hijinks in Need for Speed The Run, but Challenge Mode testifies that it's still that pedal-to-the-metal action that's the NFS series' raison d'etre.
You can contact Evan Narcisse, the author of this post, at evan@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.