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.

Probably wont go back to this. Played it with game pass' cloud streaming so I had to use a controller rather than m&kb which made combat unbearable.

The worldbuilding is fine, but it feels like combat is tacked on. When coming across a plot-area with mechanical security enemies I figured I'd be able to hack a computer to turn them off, when I couldnt find one I figured maybe I could stealth around them, only to discover that their patrols overlap and they're placed so that you cant avoid setting them off and you just have to fill them with bullets. Idk, it seems a shame that the player isn't given alternate approaches to combat in a game like this, the choice is limited to light gun, heavy gun or melee apparently.

The combat isn't fun, and the writing doesn't really have me hooked enough for me to stick around on that merit alone.