Buy Need for Speed Unbound

From arcade racer to a car fever dream, the Need for Speed series has touched upon almost every racing storyline and game type: a racing title featuring a slew of real cars, a racing title that highlights a respected sports car manufacturer, a game that emulates "The Fast and The Furious" when it was just a street racing movie, one that emulates the movie series when it pivoted to a car spy thriller, one that has players racing as both speeder and cop, and another one that goes for a "Cannonball Run" feel. That said, the series hasn't reached the heights of popularity it once had more than a console generation ago. In an effort to recapture that spot, EA assigned Criterion to repeat its magic from the Need for Speed: Most Wanted remake with Need for Speed Unbound.

Compared to the more recent entries in the series, the plot of Need for Speed Unbound is a little more down-to-earth. You and your friend Yaz came up through the foster system, eventually landing jobs at the local garage and one daydreaming of being part of the city's illegal street racing scene. Thanks to a beater of a car in the garage that Yaz has been working on for a while, you finally have a ride that's good enough to just do that. It isn't long before the worst possible thing happens; the garage gets robbed and your car is stolen, forcing you to abandon the street racing dream. Two years later, with the garage in the dumps, your character runs into someone who wants to be a backer for the garage in exchange for the chance to see you win The Grand, the big contest in a re-emerging illegal street racing scene.

A narrative in a racing game isn't a bad thing, but this one might test your patience. Part of that comes from the lingo, and while the use of modern slang is good if you want to seem relevant to the target audience, the script does the dialogue no favors by sounding forced and fake. The characters aren't that strong to begin with, either. Your main character going for revenge is fine, and the owner of the garage is good enough as an out-of-touch father figure, but everyone else either has very petty reasons for doing what they're doing or isn't interesting enough to care about. Few players go into a racing game seeking a solid narrative, and this title won't change anyone's mind.

The first thing that everyone noticed upon Unbound's initial announcement was the art style. The anime/graffiti/pop art style of the racers is one thing, but the effects that occur while you're driving like plumes is something else, including cartoon smoke from a burnout, seeing wings sprout when jumping from a raft, and the sketched-out rings on your wheels when drifting. While you can tone down the effects, you can't turn them off on the PC version, and it's better that way since the contrast between the drawn style and photo-realistic look of the cars and the environment create a nice contrast. Aside from that, the game does a great job of holding a steady 60fps or above at 4K with a RTX 4090 in tow, but you'll really appreciate the presence of DLSS if you have a high refresh rate monitor; you'll need it so the monitor can show off its potential.

The sound is more hit-and-miss, depending on your preferences. The soundtrack evokes a love-hate relationship, as there's a sprinkling of electronic and pop, but a bulk of that is from the Trap subgenre of hip-hop. The soundtrack is commendable for having more of a world flair, but if you have no love for the soundtrack, you can take solace in the fact that it only seems to play at certain moments, so most of your driving is done with engine sounds, radio commercials for the city's mayor, and chatter to keep you company. Speaking of chatter, the game never seems to stop talking; you'll get full-on conversations when driving around the city and loads of taunts in a race. The taunts provide feedback about how you're driving, but you'll sometimes wish that the game would stop talking to you for just a little while.

Unbound follows the blueprint set by the series over the past few entries. All of your races take place in the open city setting of Lakeshore, a stand-in for Chicago. Just about every race is either a point-to-point affair or a series of laps. Cops still make an appearance to disrupt a race, and there are times after the race when you'll be engaged in a chase to lose the cops so you don't get busted for your crimes. Racing earns cash, which can be used to grab a brand-new car or fix up the one you have, so it can go faster and be eligible for more races.

The racing mechanics are similar to that seen in Criterion's version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which was directly inspired by the developer's Burnout series. Nitrous is gained by doing things like catching big air, having near-misses with other cars or driving on the wrong side of the road, so it encourages aggressive driving. There is no ability to take down cars, so the aggression only goes so far. Thanks to the street racing theme, the game emphasizes drifting, and while the execution of the technique is easy, the actual act of drifting only seems to match that of older games when you're using higher class cars. With the starter cars, drifting can often feel out of control, so you feel like you're actually losing speed when doing it; that makes it detrimental unless you're sure you can recover from the loss of speed with a quick nitro boost. You can drift with your starter cars, but the learning curve is higher than expected.

That highlights one of the game's early traits: players won't feel like a street-racing wizard from the get-go. Until you tune up your car or get access to a nicer one, you're only going to get to first place in a race if all of the AI racers mess up and somehow don't rubber band to get back on your tail. The mechanic may seem punishing, but it has the side effect of players spending more time getting to know the nuances of their cars. Compared to the other racing titles that unleash a torrent of cars in the garage in quick succession, the slow and steady approach feels nice.

The open-world aspect of Unbound takes elements from other racing games to create something that is both familiar yet fun thanks to the solid driving mechanics. The various things you can do in the world, from drifting through zones to bashing through statues, will remind you heavily of what you can do in the Forza Horizon series. Blasting through billboards will take you back to Burnout Paradise, and the night and day system (complete with more aggressive cops and higher-stakes races when the sun goes down) is reminiscent of the previous game, Need for Speed Heat. About the only semi-original activity is ferrying people and vehicles from one destination to another; it's been seen in other games but is a normal activity here. Lakeshore is a unique enough setting that doing all of these things feels fresh again.

One feature that really sets apart the game from its contemporaries is the risk/reward system. Some of the racing events are free, but a good chunk come with an entry fee. No matter which event you participate in, you're given the opportunity to place side bets with the participating racers. No matter your placement in the race, you'll still gain or lose cash depending on where you place against those you've bet against. Your cash isn't safe until you return to the garage or safehouse, so getting busted by the cops has you losing all cash on your person. Finally, the game breaks from modern racing convention by not having a rewind function and limiting the number of times you can retry a race for the in-game day.

The side bet system works well to help the grind go faster, but you can feel like the progression system depends on you placing side bets in a race. Everything else makes you think about racing strategy. Limited restarts mean you accept finishing in the middle of the pack early on, and you learn to save them for the bigger races where you really miss the target. The bank system means you'll want to drive safely and treat the game like a stealth title whenever you're not in a chase. You won't get careless and end up with nothing for the day, and it's tempting to enter every event to maximize profits. It's a clever twist to the racing formula and one of the more original parts of street racing that hasn't been seen in a game for a long time.

While the game features no split-screen multiplayer, it does have online play. The good news is that you get to race around in the same open world featured in the story mode. You can head to racing meetup spots to start a race, or you can wait around and answer requests from others for an event. Events aside, you still have the same amount of side activities, from speed gates to drifting around a specific course.

The bad news is twofold. First, you don't get to carry over your progress from the single-player game and vice versa. The moment you select multiplayer mode, you go through the process of creating a new character and getting them a new car. Depending on how your campaign is going, the fresh start is either a blessing (if you were doing poorly) or a curse, since it means you have to start amassing funds again for new cars and upgrades. The other issue players will run into is the fact that there are no cops in the world. While it means that your funds are safe, it takes away the tension that most of the later Need for Speed games were known for.

If you're a Steam Deck owner, it'll take some work to get the game playable on the device. The EA App will boot up first, and unless you have that logged in and verified via another game, you'll need a Bluetooth keyboard to help you with the login process, since tapping the text boxes won't bring up the system's on-screen keyboard. Get through a lengthy process, and you'll finally reach the title screen. Get past the title screen, and it'll take several minutes of slow loading and 10% of your battery life to finally reach the character creation screen. The loading isn't much longer after this, but the first cut scene causes a crash that takes down the whole device.

Rebooting the system and getting back into the game treats you to a quicker load sequence, and you get to play the opening race. At the default settings, the system's battery lasts about 90 minutes, and the frame rate fluctuates between 16 to 30 but usually hovers around the mid- to high-20s with a bit of hitching. Finishing the opening sequence leads you to the cut scene in the garage that crashes the game and system again. The experience on the Steam Deck is cumbersome enough that unless it gets some specific patches, trying to play the game on Valve's device isn't worth it right now.

Need for Speed Unbound is a solid comeback for the series, provided you can deal with some potential annoyances. The risk/reward system functions well in creating tension during all parts of a race, but the grind is an annoyance until you get better cars or parts for your initial ride. The presence of elements borrowed from other racing titles is done well enough, but the story can be a chore to sit through if you aren't already using this slang every day. Overall, Unbound is a solid racing title that should hopefully start bringing the series back to prominence.

Score: 8.0/10