REVIEW ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AND POSTED ON JANUARY 25TH 2023

Sometimes when I play through my catalog of games, a switch in my mind gets flipped, and suddenly I have a crazy itch for some racing games. Every step of the way in my childhood of playing games, there was always a racing/driving game at some point. Mario Kart: Double Dash, The Simpsons: Road Rage, Burnout, and even now, Burnout Paradise finds its way back onto my console every now and then for a good few hours of nostalgia, but there wasn’t a lot of my backlog for racing games that I felt like playing. I had played Crash: Team Racing in the middle of last year, The Crew really wasn’t appealing to me at the time to try and jump back into its latest installment, and somehow I didn’t claim Need for Speed: Heat when it dropped on PS+ a while back. Luckily though, when this itch for racing games came back, it was about a week from the release for Need for Speed: Unbound, a new coat of paint on a long-running franchise.

The main appeal for this new game from the marketing was the new artstyle that they were implementing in particular elements of the game. While the environment and vehicles uphold the classic realistic look to them, the characters have taken up what to me, is like a 3D interpretation of the animation that you can find out of some of the Sony Pictures Animation movies, such as Spiderverse, which really pulled me in, being one of my favorite movies. What really tips it over however, and gives the artstyle that chefs kiss, is the use of graffiti coming to life as the game plays out. Your car goes airborne, stenciled in some wings as you soar across. Burning rubber at the start line, add some exaggerated, vibrantly coloured smoke of your own choice. I know that a lot of people didn’t like the mix of the two styles coming up to this games launch, but I personally love it, and think it did a better job than if they put all of their eggs into one basket with this newer style.

Moving it on from the mix of styles, I’ll take it over to the general idea of the story in this game. Everything starts off fine and dandy, as the protagonist, taking up street racing as their fun little love on the side, continuing on with their day-to-day life, working in a garage with another racing fanatic, Yasmine, as well as their father-figure equivalent, Rydell, who is the owner of the appropriately named Rydell’s Rydes. The garage has a good reputation, and the group are all sitting comfortably, until the place gets robbed of EVERYTHING, whilst the protagonist is busy chilling out, probably falling short in a race (I would never do that personally). We skip a few years, and things are totally different. The protagonist has fallen back on running a taxi service, ALSO appropriately named Rydell’s Rydes (I’m starting to think this man’s head is about to explode courtesy to the ego that comes with this), to help ends meet. At this point, street racing isn’t even a thought to the protag anymore, all until one fateful taxi ride sees a dropoff at a hideout for an upcoming race. At this point, for story reasons that I won’t mention, this leads to a heated moment for the protag, and conveniently enough, the woman that you dropped off to this hideout, Tess, is absolutely loaded, and always has her eyes on a winning horse, thus kicks off the main story of this game.

I won’t go any further into the story, because at this point, it develops VERY slowly, and as much as I would love to go into detail on more prominent characters, unfortunately, those four are about all that goes into the main character lineup. There is quite an amount that goes into this world and building its characters, but it's all really told to you while you’re distracted doing literally anything else. A$AP Rocky does show up later in the game, so that’s pretty cool. Oh, on topic with A$AP Rocky, this game has a vibing soundtrack, including Rocky himself, as well as the likes of Run The Jewels, PVRIS, as well as a cover of Where is my Mind which was a lovely track to slip off of the road at 230~ MPH to.

Last thing that I can touch up on, would be the gameplay cycle, and how the game itself operates. One thing I’ll mention now, I still haven’t played the online portion of this game, I’ve finished the main story of this game, as well as doing a lot of the side content that gets thrown at you in-between races. I’ll be honest, this part of the game is the most taxing part of it, and I think that it’s why it took me a while to sit down and finish it, excluding having to get my PS5 repaired. There are four weeks that the main part of the game spans across. At the end of every week, you have a series of races, which act as qualifiers to get into the next set, all until you make it into the grand finals. With each set of qualifiers, you need a particularly ranked car, as well as an amount of money to buy-in to the races. For the come-up of that week, your goal is to go out into the city, and make enough money to build your racing empire up to win that race, while making sure the police don’t bust you, and set you back, as they get more and more persistent as you get through each day.

Unfortunately, when you get out there, these events don’t have an awful lot of variety, and that variety doesn’t really grow as you go on. Go to the event, win it, or restart it if you come short, escape the police and go to the next one, maybe get a call from Rydell about delivering a car, until you decide that you should bank your earnings. As fun as the actual gameplay is, with this scheme of progression, I think this is what held me off from playing it for hours on end, and finishing this game a while ago. There’s the occasional challenge around the map, your classic long jumps, speed cameras, and drift challenges, but I didn’t find myself thinking about these, and as I started getting the highest tier cars, you do them without thought, playing through the daily cycle of building cash up.

From the looks of it, when you finish the game, it scraps this repeating system, and allows you to enjoy all of the game's content a lot more freely, which is going to be very helpful when I decide to come back to this game for the platinum. Plus, I’ve still gotta try out the online section of the game, which I’m dreading the constant losses in.

Besides the flow of the game rinsing through the motivation to see it through, I still thoroughly enjoyed this game, and can give it a solid 7/10, one of the more pleasing racing games I’ve played in a while.

When this first came out, I ended up dropping it after a few races but came back to it after getting it on sale. Multiple updates later, I think it's a fun enough racing game, albeit repetitive. Lakeshore as a map was more enjoyable to race and drive in than Palm City from NFS Heat for me, making the repeating events less of a chore than they were in Heat. Another thing that has changed are the police chases, where they've dumbed down the AI a bit and with a map that has more jumps and destructive rails to easily hop from lane to lane, you can evade them a lot easier. They can still be irritating at times when you're heading to a safehouse or event and you get caught by a helicopter or a car, but they're more prone to mistakes.

The progression is decent, although you're not collecting more than a couple of cars at a time due to needing large amounts of money to finish the story in the Qualifiers and then the Grand. It's not as grindy as Heat, but it is just a longer story overall due to the week system and the high entry fees for the final races.

My biggest issue was mostly some of the handling and drift controls, as the one-tap drifting mechanic carries over once again and while it is a bit better than Heat, it still has inconsistencies that can ruin your races at S or S+ rank, especially on the higher difficulties where one mistake causes 2nd place to blaze ahead at you and create a 500yd difference in 2 seconds. Sometimes you'll have a perfect drift, while other times your wheels lock up and you fly off the track. It caused more race restarts than necessary.

Overall, it's still got issues and doesn't really hold a candle to my favorite game in the series, Underground 1, but it was enjoyable enough for me to finish over Heat and some other games in the franchise. I didn't have a problem with the visual style, and I mostly played with the soundtrack muted and substituted it with a podcast or my own music, so that wasn't an issue for me.

I picked this up hoping this might be a return to form for this series but was heavily disappointed. The game's handling still occupies that weird middle ground where it is not a racing simulator but is afraid of being too arcadey. This is exasperated by the drifting and gymkhana-like events which were not fun when Codemasters started introducing them in 7th gen and are still not fun now. And topping this all off is probably one of the most infuriating wanted systems I have ever experienced in any game. The most praise I can give is that the game is technically and visually solid, and I generally enjoyed the game's soundtrack though not enough to really go out and listen to it outside of the game.

A good racing game but a terrible Need for Speed.

One of NFS Unbound's biggest problems is its gameplay, which isn't as fun as other arcade games. The game lags behind games like The Crew 2 and Forza Horizon 5

The game lacks a lot in the variety of races, from the first chapter to the grand finale, you'll play and repeat the same circuits with the exception of the grand finale. Terrible.

The variety of cars is small for a game that claims to be street racing. Seriously, why add so many hypercars when we want more vehicles that fit the 'street' concept? Customization is also another null point, it seems they've reduced vehicle customization compared to previous games. There are vehicles that don't even have customization.

Overall, it's a worthwhile game to pass the time, I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it, I just thought it was important to mention that there are small points that could be better.

I don't even know where to begin. I did not have unrealistic, nor high, expectations for this game. I'm a big fan of the arcade racing genre, and a cool art style or setting are all that I need to enjoy these games. I don't expect a grand narrative or groundbreaking gameplay. Get the physics right, give me some cool car customization, and give me a soundtrack that treats the game like a time capsule for its release year. That's it. How Electronic Arts was able to fumble this is beyond me. NFS Unbound in concept sounds like a great game. Tuning focused underground racing scene with JDM and American Muscle as your introduction, with a soundtrack advertised to be in line with Rockstar's Midnight Club series. But EA takes a really great premise and just butchers it.

The arcade racing physics are passable. The cars on straightaways and super tight chicane turns feel solid, but any other variety of the racetrack and the cars begin to feel bulky while simultaneously giving no feeling of actual weight when shifting. At first I just thought "okay I'm washed". It was a me problem. It had been a while since I had last played a racing game. But then I decided to go back to some old favorites. Wreckfest and Dirt Rally first, but I thought that they're closer to simulators than arcade racers. But then I played NFS Most Wanted on my Vita. EA could have copy and pasted the physics from their 2012 release and I would have been more satisfied gameplay wise compared to what was given in this package. Another jarring element of the game is that after every race, you are forced into a results screen, that breaks up the adrenaline of the race you just had. Then you spam through XP gain and the sort, and you're immediately thrown into a police pursuit. It could be fun if you hadn't just made me wait through a monotonous UI and button spamming skip to continue screen beforehand. It baffles me that in 2022, EA couldn't just give me the information of the race results somewhere else on the screen while I remain in the game world. It makes the open world underutilized and makes me question why this isn't a level based experience.

Now the music. They baited with the promotional videos of this game. I'm a HUGE fan of A$AP Mob. When I heard A$AP Rocky in the trailer, I was hooked. I thought this would be the 2022 equivalent to the Midnight Club: DUB soundtrack. East Coast Hip Hop, Tread Trap, Noise Rap is what I assumed from the trailer. What EA gave me was two good A$AP Mob tracks, some of Rico Nasty's worst work, and maybe a handful of good hip hop/rap tracks from some smaller artists. Aside from that, the majority of the soundtrack can be boiled down to "corporate hype music". You know the type. The kind of unobtrusive and consumer panel tested phonk and what I could only describe as Old Navy ambient-core.

What finally made me put the game down was the story. I can put aside that it isn't the most compelling narrative. There isnt much you can do with a racing game story. You start off with a beater and you become the best racer in your city. There is some variation over other games, but they can usually be reduced to that. My problem, is with how LAUGHABLY BAD the dialogue is between characters. If EA wants to cater to the younger demographic that this game is clearly targeting, they cant keep letting their 38 year old writers role play as what they assume cool highschool seniors sound like nowadays. Overuse of super annoying acronyms that no one uses anymore. Every 30 seconds required a sassy quip a la Marvel. And what is with millennial writers thinking that you can make any sentence sound "hip", no matter how robotic and overly academic they make it, just by adding "bruh" at the end. And the best part of all of this peak storytelling is that it genuinely happens maybe every 30 seconds to a minute, and it practically mutes the music, and engine sounds. Great idea to not only annoy the player, but make sure that the sound design that immerses one in these types of games is inaccessible during a good portion of the game.

With everything wrong that I just mentioned, along with a pretty boring open world map that just lacks personality even when free roaming, it pains me that this wasn't enjoyable. This genre and the theme that was chosen for NFS Unbound CAN be good. I also believe AAA game CAN be good. But it's games like this that have jaded consumers and created a sense of apathy towards projects from these larger publishers. This just feels board room tested.

I'll probably dive back in with due time to try the multiplayer, because from reviews and videos I've seen, this is where you get the turn your brain off game play loop that EA is hoping will stick.