I remember the first time I played Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit in the fall of 1997. I’m almost blown away by how cool it is. Gorgeous, lightning fast, challenging, vast and atmospheric, with very nice cars and a very smooth drive. For me, it was the gateway to the game series and the beginning of a lasting love. I really liked High Stakes (1999), Porsche Unleashed (2000), and Hot Pursuit 2, released in 2002. The following year, EA eliminated Need for Speed Underground, which, depending on what you really mean, is still one of the best racing games of all time. Absolutely brilliant.
I’ve played quite a few of the sequels and loved 2005’s Most Wanted. 2009’s Shift was also a favorite, as was the remake of Hot Pursuit, which came out in the fall of 2010, but after Shift 2: Unleashed, my sensibilities really started to shift. Runs, opponents, no-limits, returns and heat are mediocre. Those old games, with annoying car physics and lifeless monotonous game worlds, rarely had the exhilarating spirit and enthusiasm that earlier games boasted. Swedish developer Ghost Games has high ambitions for the game series, but all their attempts have bored me so badly that by 2015 I had lost my desire for everything Need for Speed.
According to the standard, a new foundation, a new workshop and a brand new car physics engine. When Unbound first came out, I was one of the people who was really pissed off. It looks a bit like Need for Speed Underground 3, and considering the team behind it were also behind Burnout 3: Takedown and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010), I’m pretty confident it’s going to be the start of something good, something new. Stuff, for a game series that’s been standing by the wayside with a flat tire while genre giants like Forza Horizon amplify. Recent years have passed at supersonic speed.
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However, after three days with Unbound, I can only sadly say that this is simply not the game Need for Speed as a franchise desperately needs. Not even close. Unbound takes place in a fictional version of Chicago (where they borrowed several famous places and then used their imaginations largely to create a game world that has both an urban setting and surrounding country roads), called Lake Shore . At the beginning of the game, you play as a mechanic and a racer in the world of street racing, in the intro, you and your boss are betrayed by your colleague Jaz, who and his new “crew” stole all of your Five cars, including the one you build in the opening 30 minutes. Now it’s just a matter of scraping together some scrap, buying an old car, and starting all over again. Races in Unbound are set on city maps and pay out for very little in the first ten hours, meaning you’ll be trying like fools to scrape together enough money to upgrade your turbo or brakes.
Jaz’s betrayal, car theft and your future as a street racer are themes to focus on in Story Mode, with the final trophy revolving around a race against Asap Rocky himself in his tuned 1988 Mercedes-Benz The 190E (which he owns in real life) was a challenge to say the least. Unbound tried to structure today’s street racing and car culture in the same way Underground once did, with graffiti, music, car styling, youth jargon, and “colorful characters,” but failed to do it the way Underground did, and was more Bordering on the hopelessly bad Need for Speed (2015).
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The screenplay is good from the start. This story is clearly written by one or more people who know nothing about street racing and have essentially zero knowledge of car culture itself. The way the dialogue is structured, what is said and what happens is more reminiscent of Gossip Girl than anything else, I can imagine Criterion’s script team seeing it a few times in Fast and Furious 2 and Teen Wolf and then Decided to mix the elements there into a cocktail of pure bullshit. It doesn’t get any better either because all the voice actors do a terrible job. No one finds it convincing, no one finds it natural or believable, instead, everything said is as false and contrived as in Need for Speed (2015) or Need for Speed: The Run. For a long time, the only thing the main characters spouted was pure Fast and Furious clichés, standards that didn’t even bother to rewrite, for example; Several times during the hour, it felt like an out-and-out parody.
Of course, if the driving itself was really good, this could be overlooked, largely ignored. When it comes to this storied game series, it’s as good as ever. There was talk beforehand of twice the calculations of what happens in the car and everything will be rebuilt from the ground up compared to previous games in the series but of course I also have to be honest here and state that it’s more or less Or less feels as accurate as Need for Speed: A little Crazy Taxi heat is thrown in when it comes to how weight and speed are presented. There’s certainly enough torque in the car, especially when it comes to raw muscle cars, to be fun, but otherwise, the driving style is hard to describe. The point is drifting, only then the cartoon graffiti effect will appear under the car, but like in Dirt 5, for example, every time you drift, you will slow down, for the money, better drive like a madman, smash the interior corner park bench instead of whipping out the rear end like a pro and trying to glide over the apex.
Sure, you get “nitro” if you skid, and of course you can use “intermediate drift” to counteract the car slowing down due to friction, but it’s still counterproductive and weird in a game that strays significantly from “realism.” Instead, Criterion should invest in a drifting mechanic that rewards the player more in the form of a challenge in the form of positioning before starting a drift, then exiting, pairing it with the correct gear in the turn and exit. More like Ridge Racer, less like Dirt 5.
Match that with conflicting design styles that don’t know what they want. When you hop across a parking lot in downtown Lakeshore, the car’s massive wings are hand-painted in bright yellow (printed with the text “BIG AIR!”) while in the air. It’s clear that there’s an imbalance and lack of consistency in how you mix the Crazy Taxi-esque arcade fun with a desire to simulate proper racing, and that ruins much of the charm.
The cop chases are also taken directly from Need for Speed: Heat, including the entire Heat system, which is just as boring as it was in the 2019 game. It could also be a game from 2005, especially when Forza Horizon 5 redefines the open world racing subgenre, which feels a bit like a paltry free-to-play rather than the much-anticipated big game that will once again take the extreme Flying cars are placed on the map. The truth is, Unbound stands no chance compared to GTA Online’s LS Tuners DLC, which both offer a fun game world, better driving feel and fun police chases. That really says it all. Fortunately, at least the graphics are really good. I mean super pretty. The Frostbite engine is as powerful as ever, and the gray-blue, cool Battlefield lighting makes Lakeshore an incredibly beautiful game world. The car models are also well done, the damage modeling is handled well, and it plays smoothly on the PlayStation 5.
The sound is also very good. Cars sound great though the soundtrack is from Palace, Sabah, Booty, Colo Colo, Kyoko, Babshikaboy, Split, Trophy, Radical, Wicked, Cursed 4 U, Rack and ASAP Rocky Not really for me (haven’t heard of any artists other than Asap Rocky), but the sound quality is good with a good variety. I also like the demo and how they mixed the frostbitten battleground city and realistic cars with hand drawn graffiti effects like cartoon tinted tire smoke or something. I think the contrast works, but it doesn’t feel like it’s anchored by anything else, which makes me a little torn. The super-simple, shadowless characters with cartoon shadow faces don’t quite fit with everything else either, which, combined with the odd mix of friction analogies and crazy taxi racers, makes Unbound feel a bit like a hodgepodge of mismatches. And not a very tasty mixture. I really hope Need for Speed Unbound will be really good. I really hope it’s as good as Hot Pursuit or Underground. However, after three days of comparisons with EA’s latest game, I can’t help but say that I think the franchise is past its prime, and of course that’s just sad.