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.

Honestly, I liked it even though there is a lot to hate. Most notably, the fact that cracked version of lift oversteer is enabled by default is absolutely beyond me. With this shit on, every car is unusable in corners, but this can be disabled. Drifting sucks too even with this thing on. HOWEVER it is still fun, it has cool cars, I loved the music, the upgrades look awesome, the police chases are excitingly hard (but I will say, the rubberbanding is crazy here, I wish a ford Raptor wouldn't be able to eazily catch up to me at 300km/h).

Having said that, the "crashing" physics is both funny and infuriating. The problem is: it seems like it only takes speed into account, so if you as much as scrape your mirror on a bush, the car just FUKING FLIPS OVER and takes massive damage. There wasn't a single time where police killed me and I was like "fair". It was always shit like that. They also somehow messed up the engine sounds. Modding an engine sound made a difference in heat, but here it hardly does anything and the sound actually depends on how hard you push the throttle more than what rpm are you at. So you can have 90% throttle at 9k rpm and the car will be silent... The biggest problem that I have with this game is why the hell are there so few races? Is it really necessary for me to do the same 10 races every day? Is it that hard to make new ones? It felt boring.

Honestly, Heat felt better even though they seem to be very similar. I remember having more fun with it.

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.