Guides › Boost and batteries

Boost and batteries

Boost is the one power you can always charge yourself. Fire it and the car surges forward and smashes through anything in its way. Here's how the meter fills, how long it lasts, and how to get the most from it.

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  Batteries

  Green batteries sit on the road in short lines of three to five, with a new line every 150 to 250 meters. Each one fills a tenth of your boost meter, so ten fill it completely. The Magnet and Hover skills pull them in from the lanes around you.

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  The boost button

  The round button in the bottom corner shows your charge. Press it, or Shift or Q on a keyboard, to fire. You need at least a quarter of the meter (three batteries) before it will go.

What a boost does

• Speed: you go 55% faster than your current speed.
• Invincibility: nothing can wreck you while you boost. Cars and barriers are smashed out of the way, 50 points each ("Smash"), and cops you ram are taken down.
• Length: a boost always burns the whole meter. A full meter lasts four seconds; a quarter lasts one.
• A safe landing: when the boost ends you get one more second of invincibility, so you're never dropped straight into a car.

Batteries you drive over during a boost don't count, so there's no recharging on the way. Batteries give no points either; their value is the boost.

Boost and Nitro together

Boost and the Nitro skill stack, but only up to a limit: together they top out at 2.1 times your normal speed. It's the fastest the car can go, and you're invincible throughout, so it's the best way through a stretch you'd never survive otherwise.

When to fire it

Through a wall

Traffic never closes all three lanes unless there's a truck you can ride over, but at high speed it can feel like it. When you can't see a way through, a boost is a way through.

Into the police

Cruisers you ram while boosting are taken down, and a takedown is worth 500 points for every star of heat you have. At five stars, one well-timed boost through two cruisers is 5,000 points. You can also ram the Interceptor for a hit. But each car you smash on the way raises your heat by half a star, so expect the chase to heat up.

Through a roadblock

Roadblocks leave one gap, which is easy to miss at top speed. A boost turns the whole roadblock into a gap, and smashing it counts as a takedown.

Not on an empty road

Firing a full meter with nothing ahead of you only buys distance. The points and the safety come from what you smash, so save it for trouble.

Next: the skills guide for the nine skills you'll pick up alongside your batteries, or tricks and scoring for where the points come from.