Unbound is a good Need for Speed game. It has a really cool visual style and distinct identity. Most importantly, the handling is good and responsive which makes it fun to play.

The more hours I played, I did have several nitpicks. The gameplay loop gets repetitive and there isn't much variety in event types or race routes. About halfway through the story mode, it really starts to feel like a grind. The cops play a major role in the gameplay and their presence is excessive at times. It's a Need for Speed game, so it's somewhat expected, but I'd like to see the next game take things in a different direction.

For a modern open world racing game, there are certain quality of life features missing like fast travel to events, rewinds, and an optional racing line. Fortunately, Unbound has three difficulty modes. While I didn't have too much trouble or frustration on Relaxed (easy) mode, it's one of the most challenging "easy" modes I can recall. The game is not very forgiving and one little mistake can cost you a race and force you to restart.

All that said, I still liked the game. The customization is great, and there are a lot of optional challenges and scavenger hunts in the open world if you feel inclined. Unbound is a step in the right direction and a strong foundation to build on going forward.

The most important part of the game, which is the handling is spot on, fantastic, mostly grip but some drift is good in some close corners, and some of the main mechanics like risk reward with money, the cops, coupled with the race requrements at the end of the week makes the first hours fantastic, i remember fucking up and getting caught on the second day of the first in-game week and loosing a ton of money and having to strategize how im going to upgrade the car, what races would i participate in, where i use my 2 available race restarts and being extremely tense when running the cops with a lot of money on hand.

Said that this game took me 30 hours to complete and basically the last 20 hours werent nearly as great and the last 10 were an obligation to finish the game, i didnt have a bad time since handling is fantastic, but all the difficulty wears off extremely quickly: while being in a slow car and inexperinced, having to deal with a level 5 heat is hard as balls and an achievent to make it out alive, with a fast car and understanding how the AI works, cops are just a chore; when you understand the best path to upgrade and buy cars, money transforms overtime from a strategy game to an acumulating pile of numbers like every AAA ever does, and in races, where I sweated and celebrated my first victory after the prologe since money was hard and you never had a fast car compared to your oponents, I ended up almost lapping A$AP Rocky in a 3 lap race to take his car in one of teh last races of the campaign, kinda like the Dark Souls 1 experience but in this game is waaaaaaaay worse, i played on the hardest difficulty btw.

Every game doesnt need to be extremely mechanically profound or anything like that, but if you main story is around 25 to 35 hours long to beat, as a designer, you cannot expect the player to have the same level of challenge if you havent made any single change to the game through it, in the original Most Wanted police heat levels werent all unlocked from the start so the high heats didnt have to be tuned down so you could escape in your Civic and you also didnt have as much time to learn how they work, level 6 heat only apears at the end of Most Wanted!, also with giving full map access at the start, 30 hours to learn how something works is a fuck ton of hours

I think i will come back to this game with a difficulty mod where requirements are higher, you have less days to meet those requirements or/and there arent races where you win cars

Need for Speed Unbound is a solid entry in the series, but it's held back by wasted potential and some major flaws. I personally love the new cell shaded artstyle and driving effects, the driving physics are greatly improved over previous entries, and the new Takeover events are pretty fun.

The game's story, while having themes of forgiveness and accepting found family, falls flat in execution because of poor pacing and unenthusiastic voice acting. There is also a background story about political rivals that doesn't really add anything to the game. Unbound's career progression is very structured and linear, resulting in a tedious and formulaic experience.

I still think Unbound is the best of the modern NFS games (2015 and onwards), but I think there's a lot of work to be done in terms of replayability, difficulty, and core gameplay loop.

I don't know where to start.

Overall, this game is far more enjoyable on the short term then most other Ghost Games made NFS, but with the limited amount of tracks and events within this game, that fun will run out quick. There seems to be around 30 tracks across 5 different classes, which is pretty limiting when only so many of them will appear on a given day, and even less are going to be worth your time for how much you earn.

I love that finally we get a racing game that not only challenges you, but doesn't always expect you to win, having only so many retries per day depending on difficulty having makes you try harder and not just restart every time to make a mistake that costs you time. But, the AI is interesting, sometimes there seems to be issues with massive rubberbaning at times, as well they may sometimes crash out throwing traffic in your way taking you out.

Early game money is low, but I believe its a good thing, but after you beat the game you still get a pretty low amount of earnings on races making getting new cars and having fun with that part of the game pretty annoying post game.

Police in this game are interesting to say the least, I love some of the changes, but I also hate others, simply way of saying it is I much prefer Heat's Police, but it's nice to be able to fight back without taking massive damage from hitting a cop yourself.

Handling, I swear every time we get somewhat closer to good handling but something is always done in a weird way. Firstly, THANK GOD GRIP IS ACTUALLY GOOD, after years of trying to now can make a full on grip build and it actually is pretty good, out doing drift is most ways, but there's the problem, drift in Unbound is lacking within this game, and is just a little more annoying then heat

Also, make up your mind on whether or not you guys actually keep offroad racing, as while the parts to build a car into offroad is still here, there are next to no events for them, and all the collectables off road are beatable with a non offroad car, making building an offroad car pretty useless right now

Overall this is an overall better game then Heat, but I'm not too sure on whether or not its actually worth the price tag considering Heat was on sale for $5 leading up to this game, most people likely already have Heat and may not find a good reason to buy this game.

It's fine. Relatively lacklustre tbh. I was alternating between this and Forza Horizon 3 before realising there's nothing to do in Unbound after about five ours or one week cycle. I've seen everything. The whole map, all the track, and events. It's just so recycled and boring. I couldn't stand the police chases or the fact that for some inexplicable reason the game resets you after each race and plants a cop car directly on your ass. There's no racers to see in the open world, only events. There are pedestrians and the concept of a busy city at work I'm this game but there's absolutely nothing going on. It's dead. It doesn't jive with the bustling street art and street car scene the game implies exists between cutscenes and the world design. I want to like this game, I want to fool around with body mods and cool liveries on normal cars like I'm 11 years old playing Underground 2 again. But, man, the game makes it hard. The progression is slow and the content and map are baren. The driving is nice, and living up to its name, there can be a decent sense of speed, but it makes it so hard to incentivise you to finish. Even the story is some boring nonsense. Feels too caught between "let's make a Spiderverse inspired racing game" and "remember we're Need for Speed, an EA franchise so no risks". I hate this term but such a cocktease of a game. I didn't hate playing it but I don't want to finish it.

coming from GT, the handling model was incomprehensible. i feel almost no difference between cars since you can set every car up for drift or grip tuning. engine swaps also make little sense as you can't put in a 4.0 Liter V8 into a tiny hatchback and expect it to create enough downforce to not spin out with FF design. but whatever. this is arcade, not sim.

races are really repetitive, online and in SP, but at least in SP you get cash and then you get cars with that cash. there isn't any weird gating, and cash is readily distributed.

in online you have to "race 100 races with a BMW to get this tier of BMW." wtf is this grind. who thought this is fun in arcade-racer?

i do like aspects of the online GTA-style server, although its really limited in design. so much more could be done but it seems EA only wants to do some car releases and track releases, no major gameplay loop overhaul in the coming months. no cops in online races is boringgggg. credit for allowing you to earn currency in party-only races, as me and my friend will just hang out and have goofy races for hours as a mindless way to catch up.

the diving pedestrians is a nice touch, and the limited destruction has those fun elements of the Frostbite engine.

Pros
Driving felt great
Cars also felt great with lots of cool customisation

Cons
Repetitive
Cops are enraging
Story/acting was cringe
No fast travel preventing you from getting to the fun part quicker - racing!

Unbound just feels like a stylistic but worse overall version of Heat, with frustrating chase mechanics and an aggravating leveling system that just hates the player making progress.

It is mechanically worse than Heat in every possible manner, with the night time risk reward mechanic even making a return from Heat but just feeling dull and poorly thought out as if they tried fitting it in after the game had already been made.

The whole experience is just frustrating and never feels like it picks up. The whole stylistic choice this game markets as its focal point just end up feel like zaney little touches that ultimately add nothing to the racing with these effects eventually blending into the background with the rest of the game.

Need For Speed: Style Over Substance.

I'll forever curse The Fast and the Furious for making game developers think their racing game needs plot.

Unbound is slightly better than Heat as at least it's visuals stand out but I just don't get who is this game for?

Are there arcade racers who actually enjoy rigging and customizing their cars down to the side mirrors and exhaust pipes?
Is slowly grinding high risk low reward satisfying to anyone?

Burnout Paradise starts you in a solid car and within five minutes lets you Smash and grab your 2nd ride. The game for all its age riddled flaws - had a flow.

Unbound gives you a high end car for the intro and then lets you pick a fixer upper for the first chunk of the game - better do this blind pick right because there's no backsies and time and money are on short supply.

My entire time with the game felt like it teased me that it will get good soon™, incredibly frustrating.

Just make a new Burnout man, hell I'll take any arcade racer that's actually fun.

Unbound will not save the arcade-racing genre… but it was close

I honestly don’t remember when I last enjoyed an NFS title. I grew up playing (amongst many other things) Hot Pursuit 2, Underground 2, Most Wanted and my all-time favourite racing game – Carbon. The last NFS titles I bought were Undercover and Hot Pursuit 2010, which were also solid. The thrill and excitement of driving dangerously while street racing is something, which we won’t find outside NFS. And I’m glad to say I did indeed have fun playing Unbound… for the first few hours. Soon after, the more I played – the more I find my experience tedious and in some cases infuriating.

Let’s start with the positives. I suppose most of you have already seen the numerous videos shitting on the OST. I can say those videos are completely taken out of context by selecting only certain parts of songs and only the 6-7 truly terrible songs – out of 72! A huge amount of the songs are bangers with a wide variety of lesser-known Western and Eastern European artists. The controls are good enough, but not as good as some of the older games. I like the changes to race rewards. Unlike other racing games, finishing first is not the only way to be rewarded or continue the story. The main goal is to earn a certain amount of money to continue with the story. You will lose money for placing poorly but good positions are always rewarded well. It never bogs down to repetitive perfectionism and keeps moving. The car customization system is also decent. There are plenty of options to individualize your ride. Moreover, they finally added the option to share your wraps with the community.

Now for the negatives. Unbound will test your tolerance for bullshit. The crash system is atrocious and it can easily ruin any enjoyment. Crash cams arrest control for several seconds and completely wreck the momentum of the race while the crash detections feel… unfinished. Sometimes trading paint will ruin your chances of placing in a good position, but a head-on collision can barely change your health bar. Most of the time crashes have zero physical sense. Moreover, the difficulty in Unbound feels very cheap and artificial. A.I. drivers with low scores somehow manage to dominate without you even having a chance of beating them. You can drive perfectly without making even a single mistake but an A.I. driver can still take the first spot with more than 250-300 meters lead. On top of that, you get a limited amount of restarts for the day and night (the story progress into days of the week and each day is divided into day racing and night racing). There is no fast travel so you have to drive to different events. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the police system was good. They are pests added to extend the game, nothing more. The map is also very bland with nothing distinctively interesting in it. You also can’t drive in a straight line through hills or shortcuts because of the absurdities of the destructible objects. The distinction is unclear between things that will evaporate on contact and things that will break you. The cherry on top for me personally is all the clutter that is on the screen. The tracks do look very detailed but having so many objects and effects on the screen makes it very hard to focus on the race and it was the main reason for all the frustration I had while playing Unbound. I’m personally not against the anime-like effects, a lot of effort was put into them but combined with everything else they feel unnecessary and too distracting.

Of course, it wouldn’t be published by EA if there were no shitty “DLCs”. Most of them are cosmetics but what made me laugh out loud was the “DLC” for 5€ which marks all the collectables (260!!!) and activities (190!!!). I will be honest – I bought it, installed a fast travel mod, got all the missing collectables, finished the missing activities and refunded it.

In conclusion, I find it very hard to recommend NFS Unbound. I bought the EA Racing Bundle on sale for ~20€ just because I wanted to get Hot Pursuit Remastered (which costs around the same price). It can be a good racing game, but it’s fundamentally flawed. It can be a better experience with some mods but it’s still a far cry from the golden Black Box era.

With Need for Speed: Unbound you get what you expect. It's a fun racing game, with some dull moments.

Let's start with the most important thing: The Driving. It kinda feels strange and not really realistic, but this game doesn't want to be realistic. Once you get the hang of it, with the driving and drifting, it really is fun.

The second important aspect: The cars. Unbound has a lot of really nice ones. Some other racing games might have more, but I still found the selection awesome – for example classic BMWs, Mercedes and one of my favorite models of all time: Ferrari Testarossa <3

The most annoying thing about Unbound, are the cops. I understand, that this is supposed to be an additional challenge next to the races, but man it can be frustrating to get rid of the cops.

The races are challenging enough and that makes them fun. You need to avoid mistakes or you'll eat the dust of the other racers real quick.

Oh and there is a story as well. It's alright, but don't expect too much.

Best Need for Speed in a hot minute. Builds upon Heat's strengths and shortfalls well. The story is a LOT better this time round, it's not masterpiece, but definitely an improvement on Heat's which seemed to just end out of nowhere. It does feel half baked in some parts, for example, we just never meet the main antagonist. This is the second game in a row with draconian police being a key story element and I don't really care for it. There's some funny background dialogue, but ultimately the heart of the story is between the player character, Rydell and Yaz. I think if they dropped the politics, or at least considered having some nuance in their approach it would be a lot better received. I like the visuals, I think the stylisation does bring something to the game. Customisation is great, as it was in heat, although the system for searching for community wraps is a lot more restrictive than Heat for some reason.

What was most refreshing was how challenging the game is. I did genuinely struggle at times to buy and upgrade my car AND have money for the Saturday events. The time pressure is real, and you have to weigh up the risk of police chases with earning more money. Police chases are gruelling this time round, I really struggled escaping police at max level tbh, I got busted a couple of times during the story. The tiered police is a great idea, having to change up tactics depending on heat level added something more than the standard outrun/confuse the AI. I do also like the added difficulty in races & limited retries. It does add an extra element of strategy when you're cash strapped and need to consider the cost of events, the heat gain, what profit you'll get if you don't place 1st.

Like others have mentioned, tracks are repeated quite often. I don't think it's quite as noticable as it was in NFS Heat, but it can get old in postgame, especially if you're grinding to buy/customise a car. It does shorten the games lifespan imo.

Ultimately, Unbound is stylish, challenging and fun, the best Need for Speed since it was brought back. All it is lacking is just more content race-wise and a little more nuance in the story.

Specs: RTX 3060 (12GB VRAM), Ryzen 5 3400G, 16GB RAM DDR4, game installed on a HDD
Played it on Ultra, for the most part game ran at 60fps, with occaisional subtle dips down to 50ish. Texture pop-in could be quite aggressive at high speeds, it could be worth installing on a SSD, but this could also be a result of my cpu bottleneck.

Criterion are back after their work on ‘Most Wanted (2012) to give us ‘Need For Speed: Unbound’, yet again another refresh of the series. Unbound takes the framework of the previous game ‘Heat’ and improves on a few things as well as a dash of features from ‘Most Wanted (2012)’. I had my doubts about this game from the footage I saw prior to playing, but I ended up not hating it as much as I thought I would.

The gameplay centres around your character trying to trace down their stolen cars from their garage by winning weekly races. There are 4 weeks in total, 6 racing days a week, twice daily and then one big race day at the end of the week. You need to cough up a large sum of money to do the end of each week’s race and if you don’t have the cash you’re given the opportunity to grind the prior day until you do. By the end of week 4 you need to have at least 1 car of each class apart from class B. This structure added stress as I felt as though I was preparing for an exam and having the anxiety of “what if it comes to the last race, I have shit cars and no money?” If you’re reading this before playing the game then don’t worry too much. Play 2-3 races a day as well as the car drop off missions and you’ll have more than enough. I know that there will be seasoned players out there who could probably do this game on 1 race per week. Each race also lets you gamble some of your money depending on where you think you will place in the race.

I like how this game starts off with getting you to work up the ranks and places in the race rather than making you be 1st every time. People have commented on the unfair AI of the opposing cars but I would only sometimes see this when you’d be first and at the last checkpoint another car would rocket out of nowhere and pass you at 500 mph and win the race. If, like me, you're coming from the previous game ‘Heat’ where almost everything is destructible, well you’re going to be in for a big surprise because not everything is destructible here. This will become apparent when you will crash through one barrier but crash into another. In the heat of a chase or a race it is hard to distinguish what you can and cannot crash through so you will find yourself crashing a lot.

There is a huge car selection available and I was fortunate enough to get bonus cars from the EA play membership although I only used the “Fairlady” car. Once again you’re doing loads of customisations to maximise each class of car and get the best performance out of it. If you’re thinking of using Google/Reddit to decide on what best cars to have, take what they say with a pinch of salt. Either no one agrees on the same cars or they will recommend cars only available after completing the game.

A graphical change again for the NFS series with cell shaded characters and realistic backgrounds. As you don’t often see them side-by-side it’s not that jarring. One thing that I was unsure about at first was the animations coming out of your car and its tires as you drift or hit nitros but then I accepted it as a nice visual flare. It’s very much inspired by the new animated Spider-Man films.The realistic backgrounds look great as well as the raindrops on the cars.

One thing that has not changed throughout the NFS series is the writing. Oh god is it bad here. The problem is, it doesn’t seem self aware. It’s not deliberately cheesy, it's as if a middle aged person wrote a bunch of young people based on their interpretation of how they think they speak. The “trash talk” and patter in the game is absolutely dire. It’s the first time in the whole series I considered muting the voice acting volume. One time I was forced to hear a whole spiel from one of the characters before I could enter my garage. Before they could finish I was chased by the cops so had to then deal with a chase on top of the terrible dialogue. The game includes the real life rapper A$AP Rocky. He appears in the game as a character and his music is heavily featured on the soundtrack. One mission you need to drive him and his car from point A to point B twice. The worst part of this mission is having to hear him waffle shite for about 10 minutes.

The soundtrack is ok, a few classics and decent tunes in there but nothing with much energy that makes you think “fuck yeah” while battering through the streets at 200 mph.

Unlike in ‘Heat’ the cops are much easier to escape from and don’t have that bullshit busted gauge. Surprisingly I was never actually busted in my whole playthrough despite numerous prolonged chases. I absolutely hate the heat system in this game, I would have enjoyed it a lot more if the police were just confined to the races rather than when you’re traversing the open world. I know that this opinion may be controversial as one of IGN’s negatives in their review was that the cops were not featured in the online mode. I would get so frustrated shaking the cops and trying to stay out of their line of sight that I wanted to give up the game so badly. What was salt in the wound as well was that after a certain amount of time, if you cannot shake that one cop a timer will appear that once depleted will spawn 4-5 new cops around you. I feel like this is an absolute dick move from the game. I would also get frustrated at cops spawning right next to you in the open world and initiating a chase.

With all of the above, you may ask “so is this game worth it then for all of those niggles?” No, in my opinion it is not. There is a lot of work and stress for very little reward. Everything given to you for winning races is required for completing the main storyline. It feels like being paid in bricks to build a house rather than being given cool features to build a house. You can unlock some cool cars such as the BMW M3 from ‘Most Wanted (2015)’ which makes cameo appearances in most of the NFS games like Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars TV shows. This game marks the end of me playing all the Need For Speed game post ‘Underground’ for my article and let me tell you thank god I’m done. I’ve had ups and downs throughout the series and what a disappointing way to end my journey than with Unbound. This game would be vastly improved in my opinion of the writing was better and the cops weren’t so frustrating to manage.The only way I could recommend this game to someone would be if they have not played any of the other games but even then I’d recommend another such as ‘Payback'