Need for Speed Retrospective #21

There's lots to like about this mobile title. It's absolutely amazing how much fun and engaging gameplay No Limits gets out of basically four buttons/inputs. The drifting and boosting mechanics are fantastic and different objectives and obstacles bring loads of variety. From a pure gameplay perspective, I enjoyed this much more than any other automatic-driving game I've played. Visually, the game looks stunning. The devs played it safe by going for the fan-favourite Underground era look, but they absolutely nailed it.

So why the bad rating?
No Limits, like many other free-to-play games, quickly reaches a point where it basically renders itself unplayable unless you pay for it. And No Limits is particularly aggressive in this regard. Every dark pattern you've ever heard of is present in this game. There's deceptive currencies, there's misleading UI design, there's FOMO, there's gambling. So much gambling, in fact.

Reaching this point, I was robbed of any will to further engage with this distortion of a videogame. It's a tragedy that we as a capitalist society decided to let greed hamper our art like this.