Need for Speed™ Unbound

My first few hours with Unbound had me genuinely unsure whether to cheer or quit. You start at the bottom of Lakeshore City's street racing scene with a sluggish starter car, and the game absolutely will not hand you a win until you've earned it. That steep opening curve is deliberate: the whole campaign is structured around a weekly cycle where you grind daytime events, bank cash, and manage an escalating Heat meter that sends increasingly aggressive cops after you the more races you stack. Get caught, get rammed to scrap, or just make one greedy decision too many, and you lose your banked earnings for the session. It is a proper risk-and-reward loop, and when it clicks, it feels fantastic. The headline feature is the art style, and it is genuinely polarising in a way that pure screenshots can't prepare you for. Photo-realistic cars and Chicago-inspired open-world environments are layered with cel-shaded graffiti effects: colourful smoke tags spray out of your tyres mid-drift, anime-style wings shoot off your roof on long jumps, and nitrous triggers a cartoon burst visual. Criterion added an option to dial these effects back after launch pressure, which is appreciated. Strip them out and you still have one of the better-looking car rosters in any arcade racer, and a sense of speed through downtown Lakeshore that genuinely makes your palms damp. The race types cover circuits, point-to-point sprints, drift challenges, and Takeover events where you chain actions for a score rather than just a placing. None of them are revolutionary, but they're solid and feel good at pace. Car customisation is deep and worth your time. The garage lets you tune builds for grip or drift handling, upgrade individual performance parts, and go wild on liveries. The Rival betting system, where you pick a specific opponent and wager cash on beating them rather than winning outright, adds a smart layer to races you're not yet quick enough to dominate. The story, however, is exactly as thin as the 'betrayal-and-revenge' setup implies. The script tries hard to sound street-authentic and mostly lands somewhere between cringeworthy and forgettable, with A$AP Rocky's Takeover event appearances being a fun exception. Nobody is buying a Need for Speed game for Criterion's screenwriting anyway, but it does drag in the cutscene-heavy early hours. The Steam version sitting at 60% positive out of nearly 58,000 reviews tells you there is real friction here. The economy feels punishing mid-game, the steering on early cars can feel floaty to the point of genuine frustration for newcomers, and the PC version specifically drew more criticism than the console releases. Multiplayer is a separate progression track, which means all the cars you've spent hours building in the campaign stay locked to campaign mode online. That split is a genuine bummer for anyone hoping to take their souped-up Civic into online lobbies. There is no split-screen, and while online sessions function, they are notably thin in content compared to what the single-player loop offers. For a group game night this is not your pick. That said, if you are a solo arcade racer fan who misses the underground street vibe of early 2000s NFS and wants something with more bite than Forza Horizon's cheerful open world, Unbound delivers that specific thing well. The Heat system keeps every session tense, the Takeover events and drift zones give you plenty to chase beyond the main race calendar, and the post-launch volumes added nine rounds of content including, of all things, drivable motorcycles via the BMW S1000RR in the final update. It is a flawed game that was quietly one of the better arcade racers of its launch year. Just go in knowing it will not coddle you.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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